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The U.S. stock market the Dow Jones
Industrial Average closed at 10,640.83 up 1.8% from
the previous week's close of 10,449.14. The NASDAQ closed
at 2,156.78, up 2.1% from the close of 2112.18 the Friday
before. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury bond
was 4.17% on close of Friday, up seven basis points
from 4.10 the week before. The U.S. dollar closed at
0.8308 euros on Friday, down 0.6% compared to 0.8357
the previous Friday. That puts the euro at 1.2036 dollars,
compared to 1.1966 the week before. Oil closed at $58.09
a barrel, down 1.6% from the previous week's $59.04.
In terms of euros a barrel of oil would cost 48.26 euros,
down 2.2% from last Friday's close of 49.34. Gold closed
at 421.70 dollars an ounce down 0.8% from $424.90 on
the previous Friday. The gold/oil ratio (how many barrels
of oil an ounce of gold would buy) closed at 7.26, up
0.8% from last week's 7.20.

The U.S. stock market was up again on positive sentiment
in the United States (Note to our non-United States
readers: What can I say? We're completely deluded optimists.):

July 15 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. consumer sentiment unexpectedly
rose in July to the highest this year as sustained
job growth and rising home values encouraged Americans,
a private report showed.

The University of Michigan's preliminary consumer
sentiment index for the month rose to 96.5 from 96
in June, to produce the year's first consecutive gain.
A reading of 95 was forecast for the month, according
to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey
of economists.

Consumers have become accustomed to rising gasoline
prices, which reached a record last week, economists
said. They've also become adept at tapping into home
equity gains, which may support spending and economic
growth in the coming months.

"The recent uptick in gas prices hadn't been
steep enough or sustained long enough to spook consumers,
who've grown accustomed to prices going up and coming
down," David Huether, director of economic policy
at the National Association of Manufacturers in Washington,
said before the report.

The 55 forecasts in the Bloomberg News survey ranged
from a high of 100.2 to a low of 91. The preliminary
sentiment index is based on a phone survey of about
300 households. The final report for the month, due
July 29, will reflect about 500 responses.

The current conditions index, which reflects Americans'
perception of their financial situation and whether
it's a good time to buy big-ticket items, fell to
112 in July from 113.2 in June. The expectations index,
based on optimism about the next one to five years,
increased to 86.6 from 85.

"A lot of what we've seen in consumer attitude
surveys this year has been dictated by energy prices,
specifically gas prices at the pump which people see
on a daily basis," Glenn Haberbush, an economist
at Mizuho Securities USA Inc. in Hoboken, New Jersey,
said before the report. Still, "it's a 'watch
what I do, not what I say' kind of scenario because
people are spending even as they're complaining."

Energy Prices

The average price for a gallon of gasoline at the
pump rose to a record $2.33 for the week ended July
11, compared with an average of $2.16 for June and
$1.92 for the same week a year ago, according to the
Energy Department. Oil prices reached a record $61.20
a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange July
7 on concerns that Hurricane Dennis might interrupt
production in the Gulf of Mexico.

According to government reports issued the past two
days, manufacturing in is improving and retail sales
are on the increase. The data suggest inflation fears
are receding and economic growth is strengthening.

An index of manufacturing in New York state, which
provides an early clue to U.S. factory activity, rose
to 23.9 in July from 10.5 last month, the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York said today. In June, U.S.
industrial production increased 0.9 percent, the most
since February 2004, and U.S. wholesale prices were
unchanged, other government reports showed today.

Inflation Tame

Prices U.S. consumers paid for goods and services
were unchanged in June after declining 0.1 percent
in May, the government said yesterday. U.S. retail
sales surged 1.7 percent in June after decreasing
0.3 percent the prior month.

Hurricane Dennis, which struck the Florida Panhandle
July 10, helped spur sales of food and emergency supplies
in the southeastern United States, according to Wal-Mart
Stores Inc. On July 9, the world's largest retailer
said sales at its U.S. stores which had been open
at least a year were rising within this month's forecast
range of 3 percent to 5 percent.

Job growth and higher wages are encouraging spending,
said David Abella, an analyst with Rochdale Investment
Management in New York.

Job creation has averaged 181,000 a month this year,
compared with 182,830 in 2004, which was the most
since 1999. The unemployment rate fell to 5.1 percent
last month, the lowest since September 2001, according
to the Labor Department.

Consumer Spending

Consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent
of the economy, will probably rise at a 3.2 percent
annual pace this quarter after increasing 3.6 percent
in the first three months of the year, according to
the Bloomberg monthly economist survey published July
12.

"In spite of the spike in gas prices, consumer
spending is holding up very well," Ken Mayland,
president of ClearView Economics LLC in Pepper Pike,
Ohio, said before the report. "We know the job
picture is better and we know stock price performance
has been better and we know they both go into the
confidence stew."

Lower mortgage rates have also buoyed consumer attitudes,
allowing many homeowners to refinance at lower borrowing
costs and tap equity from increased home values, Mayland
said.

Thirty-year fixed mortgage rates remain near the
14-month low of 5.53 percent reached in the the week
ending July 1, according to Freddie Mac, the second-biggest
purchaser of U.S. mortgages. The Standard and Poor's
500 Index reached 1223.29 July 13, its highest level
since March 7.

"The shock has kind of worn off and people are
finding that they can afford these oil and gas prices,"
Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight
Inc., in Lexington, Massachusetts, said before the
report. "Consumers are feeling pretty good and
the numbers suggest they're spending at a decent clip."

During this politically tricky time in the United States,
the ruling class is doing everything it can to keep
the economy expanding, even if it means a worse crash
later. For example, nothing has been done to pull back
the reckless lending into the housing bubble:

WASHINGTON, July 14 - For two months now, federal
banking regulators have signaled their discomfort
about the explosive rise in risky mortgage loans.

First they issued new "guidance" to banks
about home-equity loans, warning against letting homeowners
borrow too much against their houses. Then they expressed
worry about the surge in no-money-down mortgages,
interest-only loans and "liar's loans" that
require no proof of a borrower's income.

The impact so far? Almost nil.

"It's as easy to get these loans now as it was
two months ago," said Michael Menatian, president
of Sanborn Mortgage, a mortgage broker in West Hartford,
Conn. "If anything, people are offering them
even more than before."

The reason is that federal banking regulators, from
the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller
of the Currency, have been reluctant to back up their
words with specific actions. For even as they urge
caution, officials here are loath to stand in the
way of new methods of extending credit.

"We don't want to stifle financial innovation,"
said Steve Fritts, associate director for risk management
policy at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
"We have the most vibrant housing and housing-finance
market in the world, and there is a lot of innovation.
Normally, we think that if consumers have a lot of
choice, that's a good thing."

Economically, the United States is now enjoying the
benefits of massive war spending and the attendant deficit
spending. This will always provide a short term stimulus.
We should keep in mind the human cost as well as the
long term risks, particularly if the war is a losing
one. Here is Norman Solomon on the blood-soaked nature
of U.S. economic growth:

During the Vietnam War, one of the peace movement's
more sardonic slogans was: "War is good business.
Invest your son."

In recent years, some eminent pundits and top government
officials have become brazen about praising war as
a good investment.

Thomas Friedman's 1999 book "The Lexus and the
Olive Tree" summed up a key function of the USA's
high-tech arsenal. "The hidden hand of the market
will never work without a hidden fist," he wrote.
"McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell
Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15.
And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for
Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called
the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

On Sept. 12, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell
spoke this way as he defended the U.S. military occupation
of Iraq: "Since the United
States and its coalition partners have invested a
great deal of political capital, as well as financial
resources, as well as the lives of our young men and
women -- and we have a large force there now -- we
can't be expected to suddenly just step aside."
He was voicing the terminology and logic of a major
capitalist investor.

And so, it was fitting when the New York Times reported
days ago that Powell will soon be (in the words of
the headline) "Taking a Role in Venture Capitalism."
The article explained that Powell is becoming a partner
in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a renowned
Silicon Valley venture firm: "Mr. Powell acknowledged
in an interview Tuesday that he has had any number
of tempting job offers since leaving the State Department
in January, but that the chance to work as a venture
capitalist at Kleiner Perkins seemed too enticing
to turn down."

Writ large, the balance-sheet outlook of venture
capitalism is being widely applied to the current
war in Iraq -- even while defenders of the war are
apt to indignantly reject any claim that it's driven
by zeal for massive profits. But let's take the corporate
firms at their own words.

Last year, I went through the latest
annual reports from some American firms with Pentagon
contracts. Those reports acknowledged, as a matter
of fact, the basic corporate reliance on the warfare
state.

Orbit International Corp., a small business making
high-tech products for use by the U.S. Navy, Air Force,
Army, and Marines, had increased its net sales by
nearly $2.4 million during the previous two years,
to about $17.1 million -- and the war future was bright.
"Looking ahead," CEO Dennis Sunshine reported,
"Orbit's Electronics and
Power Unit Segments expect to continue to benefit
from the expanding military/defense and homeland security
marketplace." In its yearly report to
federal regulators, Orbit International acknowledged:
"We are heavily dependent upon military spending
as a source of revenues and income. Accordingly, any
substantial future reductions in overall military
spending by the U.S. government could have a material
adverse effect on our sales and earnings."

A much larger corporation, Engineered Support Systems,
Inc., had quadrupled its net revenues between 1999
and 2003, when they reached $572.7 million. For the
report covering 2003, the firm's top officers signed
a statement that declared: "As
we have always said, rapid deployment of our armed
forces drives our business." The company's president,
Jerry Potthoff, assured investors: "Our nation's
military is deployed in over 130 countries, so our
products and personnel are deployed, as well. As long
as America remains the world's policeman, our products
and services will help them complete their missions."

The gigantic Northrop Grumman firm, while noting
that its revenues totaled $26.2 billion in 2003, boasted:
"In terms of the portfolio,
Northrop Grumman is situated in the sweet spot' of
U.S. defense and national security spending."

War. How sweet it can be.

This excerpt is from Norman Solomon's new book War
Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning
Us to Death, published in July 2005. For more information,
go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com

Again, the economic benefits of a Spartan-like military
state can continue only if the wars are successful.
Military spending on losing efforts can only hasten
sharp economic decline. And the resistance to the American
Empire, in Iraq, in Latin America, in the statements
of the leaders of China and Russia, do not bode well
for continued expansion. The wishful thinking of the
powerful can make it easy to overlook the beginning
of the end of a system of exploitation. That end will
often grow out of the areas that the dominant actor
cannot comprehend. What is the one thing the corporations
that embody late capitalism cannot understand? Empathy.
They are psychopathic by nature and the psychopath cannot
understand empathy and conscience. Here is Subcomandante
Marcos of the remarkable Zapatista Movement describing
the beginnings of their uprising:

And then our small history was that we grew tired
of exploitation by the powerful, and then we organized
in order to defend ourselves and to fight for justice.
In the beginning there were not many of us, just a
few, going this way and that, talking with and listening
to other people like us. We did that for many years,
and we did it in secret, without making a stir. In
other words, we joined forces in silence. We remained
like that for about 10 years, and then we had grown,
and then we were many thousands. We trained ourselves
quite well in politics and weapons, and, suddenly,
when the rich were throwing their New Year's Eve parties,
we fell upon their cities and just took them over.
And we left a message to everyone that here we are,
that they have to take notice of us. And then the
rich took off and sent their great armies to do away
with us, just like they always do when the exploited
rebel - they order them all to be done away with.
But we were not done away with at all, because we
had prepared ourselves quite well prior to the war,
and we made ourselves strong in our mountains. And
there were the armies, looking for us and throwing
their bombs and bullets at us, and then they were
making plans to kill off all the indigenous at one
time, because they did not know who was a zapatista
and who was not. And we were running and fighting,
fighting and running, just like our ancestors had
done. Without giving up, without surrendering, without
being defeated.

What the Zapatistas in Mexico, along with the Bolivian
indigenous rebels and the Chavistas in Venezuela, are
attacking is the heart of the system of capitalist exploitation:
the alliance of international capital with local neo-feudal
exploiters. But as important as the "attack"
is their building of alternate systems of social welfare,
their conceiving of alternate systems of economy, and
even alternate systems of relating to other people globally.
Here is Subcomandante Marcos again, describing the disillusionment
that followed after the Mexican government decided not
to honor its agreements with the Zapatista movement:

And the first thing we saw
was that our heart was not the same as before, when
we began our struggle. It was larger, because now
we had touched the hearts of many good people. And
we also saw that our heart was more hurt, it was more
wounded. And it was not wounded by the deceits of
the bad governments, but because, when we touched
the hearts of others, we also touched their sorrows.
It was as if we were seeing ourselves in a mirror.

What this indigenous movement saw was the similar suffering
in communities around the world: a variety of different
groups sharing the status of capitalist victims, of
sufferers. As Bob Marley sang in "Babylon System:"

Babylon system is the vampire.
Sucking the children day by day.
Babylon system is the vampire,
Sucking the blood of the sufferers.
Building church and university.
Deceiving the people continually.
Me say them graduating thieves and murderers.
Look out now.
Sucking the blood of the sufferers.

Tell the children the truth.
Tell the children the truth.
Tell the children the truth right now.
Come on and tell the children the truth.

'Cause we've been trodding on the winepress much
too long.
Got to rebel, got to rebel now.
We've been taken for granted,
Much too long. Rebel.

Here is the Zapatista take on capitalism and neoliberalism:

Now we are going to explain to you how we, the zapatistas,
see what is going on in the world. We see that capitalism
is the strongest right now. Capitalism is a social
system, a way in which a society goes about organizing
things and people, and who has and who has not, and
who gives orders and who obeys. In capitalism, there
are some people who have money, or capital, and factories
and stores and fields and many things, and there are
others who have nothing but their strength and knowledge
in order to work. In capitalism, those who have money
and things give the orders, and those who only have
their ability to work obey.

Then capitalism means that there a few who have great
wealth, but they did not win a prize, or find a treasure,
or inherited from a parent. They obtained that wealth,
rather, by exploiting the work of the many. So capitalism
is based on the exploitation of the workers, which
means they exploit the workers and take out all the
profits they can. This is done unjustly, because they
do not pay the worker what his work is worth. Instead
they give him a salary that barely allows him to eat
a little and to rest for a bit, and the next day he
goes back to work in exploitation, whether in the
countryside or in the city.

And capitalism also makes its wealth from plunder,
or theft, because they take what they want from others,
land, for example, and natural resources. So capitalism
is a system where the robbers are free and they are
admired and used as examples.

And, in addition to exploiting and plundering, capitalism
represses because it imprisons and kills those who
rebel against injustice.

Capitalism is most interested in
merchandise, because when it is bought or sold, profits
are made. And then capitalism turns everything into
merchandise, it makes merchandise of people, of nature,
of culture, of history, of conscience. According to
capitalism, everything must be able to be bought and
sold. And it hides everything behind the merchandise,
so we don't see the exploitation that exists. And
then the merchandise is bought and sold in a market.
And the market, in addition to being used for buying
and selling, is also used to hide the exploitation
of the workers. In the market, for example, we see
coffee in its little package or its pretty little
jar, but we do not see the campesino who suffered
in order to harvest the coffee, and we do not see
the coyote who paid him so cheaply for his work, and
we do not see the workers in the large company working
their hearts out to package the coffee. Or we see
an appliance for listening to music like cumbias,
rancheras or corridos, or whatever, and we see that
it is very good because it has a good sound, but we
do not see the worker in the maquiladora who struggled
for many hours, putting the cables and the parts of
the appliance together, and they barely paid her a
pittance of money, and she lives far away from work
and spends a lot on the trip, and, in addition, she
runs the risk of being kidnapped, raped and killed
as happens in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico.

So we see merchandise in the market, but we do not
see the exploitation with which it was made. And then
capitalism needs many markets...or a very large market,
a world market.

And so the capitalism of today is
not the same as before, when the rich were content
with exploiting the workers in their own countries,
but now they are on a path which is called Neoliberal
Globalization. This globalization means that they
no longer control the workers in one or several countries,
but the capitalists are trying to dominate everything
all over the world. And the world, or Planet Earth,
is also called the "globe", and that is
why they say "globalization," or the entire
world.

And neoliberalism is the idea that
capitalism is free to dominate the entire world, and
so tough, you have to resign yourself and conform
and not make a fuss, in other words, not rebel. So
neoliberalism is like the theory, the plan, of capitalist
globalization. And neoliberalism has its economic,
political, military and cultural plans. All of those
plans have to do with dominating everyone, and they
repress or separate anyone who doesn't obey so that
his rebellious ideas aren't passed on to others.

Then, in neoliberal globalization, the great capitalists
who live in the countries which are powerful, like
the United States, want the entire world to be made
into a big business where merchandise is produced
like a great market. A world market for buying and
selling the entire world and for hiding all the exploitation
from the world. Then the global capitalists insert
themselves everywhere, in all the countries, in order
to do their big business, their great exploitation.
Then they respect nothing, and they meddle wherever
they wish. As if they were conquering other countries.
That is why we zapatistas say that neoliberal globalization
is a war of conquest of the entire world, a world
war, a war being waged by capitalism for global domination.
Sometimes that conquest is by armies who invade a
country and conquer it by force. But sometimes it
is with the economy, in other words, the big capitalists
put their money into another country or they lend
it money, but on the condition that they obey what
they tell them to do. And they also insert their ideas,
with the capitalist culture which is the culture of
merchandise, of profits, of the market.

Then the one which wages the conquest, capitalism,
does as it wants, it destroys and changes what it
does not like and eliminates what gets in its way.
For example, those who do not produce nor buy nor
sell modern merchandise get in their way, or those
who rebel against that order. And they despise those
who are of no use to them. That is why the indigenous
get in the way of neoliberal capitalism, and that
is why they despise them and want to eliminate them.
And neoliberal capitalism also gets rid of the laws
which do not allow them to exploit and to have a lot
of profit. They demand that everything can be bought
and sold, and, since capitalism has all the money,
it buys everything. Capitalism destroys the countries
it conquers with neoliberal globalization, but it
also wants to adapt everything, to make it over again,
but in its own way, a way which benefits capitalism
and which doesn't allow anything to get in its way.
Then neoliberal globalization, capitalism, destroys
what exists in these countries, it destroys their
culture, their language, their economic system, their
political system, and it also destroys the ways in
which those who live in that country relate to each
other. So everything that makes a country a country
is left destroyed.

Then neoliberal globalization wants to destroy the
nations of the world so that only one Nation or country
remains, the country of money, of capital. And capitalism
wants everything to be as it wants, in its own way,
and it doesn't like what is different, and it persecutes
it and attacks it, or puts it off in a corner and
acts as if it doesn't exist.

Then, in short, the capitalism of global neoliberalism
is based on exploitation, plunder, contempt and repression
of those who refuse. The same as before, but now globalized,
worldwide.

But it is not so easy for neoliberal
globalization, because the exploited of each country
become discontented, and they will not say well, too
bad, instead they rebel. And those who remain and
who are in the way resist, and they don't allow themselves
to be eliminated. And that is why we see, all over
the world, those who are being screwed over making
resistances, not putting up with it, in other words,
they rebel, and not just in one country but wherever
they abound. And so, as there is a neoliberal globalization,
there is a globalization of rebellion.

And it is not just the workers of the countryside
and of the city who appear in this globalization of
rebellion, but others also appear who are much persecuted
and despised for the same reason, for not letting
themselves be dominated, like women, young people,
the indigenous, homosexuals, lesbians, transsexual
persons, migrants and many other groups who exist
all over the world but who we do not see until they
shout ya basta of being despised, and they raise up,
and then we see them, we hear them, and we learn from
them.

And then we see that all those groups
of people are fighting against neoliberalism, against
the capitalist globalization plan, and they are struggling
for humanity.

And we are astonished when
we see the stupidity of the neoliberals who want to
destroy all humanity with their wars and exploitations,
but it also makes us quite happy to see resistances
and rebellions appearing everywhere, such as ours,
which is a bit small, but here we are. And we see
this all over the world, and now our heart learns
that we are not alone.

Much of this critique of neoliberal capitalism has
been said before. But notice what is new here: the explicit
emotional appeal of empathy and community. That can
be a powerful weapon against a system that makes everyone
alone, isolated and powerless, a system incapable of
empathy or human feeling.

What we want in the world is to tell all of those
who are resisting and fighting in their own ways and
in their own countries, that you are not alone, that
we, the zapatistas, even though we are very small,
are supporting you, and we are going to look at how
to help you in your struggles and to speak to you
in order to learn, because what we have, in fact,
learned is to learn.

And we want to tell the Latin American peoples that
we are proud to be a part of you, even if it is a
small part. We remember quite well how the continent
was also illuminated some years ago, and a light was
called Che Guevara, as it had previously been called
Bolivar, because sometimes the people take up a name
in order to say they are taking up a flag.

And we want to tell the people of Cuba, who have
now been on their path of resistance for many years,
that you are not alone, and we do not agree with the
blockade they are imposing, and we are going to see
how to send you something, even if it is maize, for
your resistance. And we want to tell the North American
people that we know that the bad governments which
you have and which spread harm throughout the world
is one thing - and those North Americans who struggle
in their country, and who are in solidarity with the
struggles of other countries, are a very different
thing. And we want to tell the Mapuche brothers and
sisters in Chile that we are watching and learning
from your struggles. And to the Venezuelans, we see
how well you are defending your sovereignty, your
nation's right to decide where it is going. And to
the indigenous brothers and sisters of Ecuador and
Bolivia, we say you are giving a good lesson in history
to all of Latin America, because now you are indeed
putting a halt to neoliberal globalization. And to
the piqueteros and to the young people of Argentina,
we want to tell you that, that we love you. And to
those in Uruguay who want a better country, we admire
you. And to those who are sin tierra in Brazil, that
we respect you. And to all the young people of Latin
America, that what you are doing is good, and you
give us great hope.

And we want to tell the brothers and sisters of Social
Europe, that which is dignified and rebel, that you
are not alone. That your great movements against the
neoliberal wars bring us joy. That we are attentively
watching your forms of organization and your methods
of struggle so that we can perhaps learn something.
That we are considering how we can help you in your
struggles, and we are not going to send euro because
then they will be devalued because of the European
Union mess. But perhaps we will send you crafts and
coffee so you can market them and help you some in
the tasks of your struggle. And perhaps we might also
send you some pozol, which gives much strength in
the resistance, but who knows if we will send it to
you, because pozol is more our way, and what if it
were to hurt your bellies and weaken your struggles
and the neoliberals defeat you.

And we want to tell the brothers and sisters of Africa,
Asia and Oceania that we know that you are fighting
also, and we want to learn more of your ideas and
practices.

And we want to tell the world that we want to make
you large, so large that all those worlds will fit,
those worlds which are resisting because they want
to destroy the neoliberals and because they simply
cannot stop fighting for humanity.

Comment: We
note again for good measure that we at Signs of the
Times in no way support violence or armed uprisings.
Nevertheless, it does seem that the powers that be have
a certain weakness in their psychopathic inability to
empathise with another's suffering. They also engage
quite often in extraordinary feats of that old nemesis,
wishful thinking. But while change remains a possibility,
the question still remains: what will it take for enough
folks to wake up to what is occurring in the world today?
Just how bad do things have to get? Historically, it
appears that when humankind refuses to take a stand
against the entropic principle - perhaps choosing entropy
by default in refusing to make the choice between creativity
and entropy in the first place - disaster on a personal
as well as global scale soon follows. In any case, all
indications are that the US economy, and therefore the
world economy, cannot remain propped up much longer...

ISRAEL IS SET to evacuate
its settlements from the Gaza Strip in mid-August. Until
recently, the right-wing opponents of disengagement were
making inroads. According to a survey by Yediot Aharonot,
the proportion of the plan’s supporters had declined
from 64% in February to 53% in early June. Three weeks
later the trend reversed. Support shot back to 62%.

What happened was this: A cabal of young Kahanists had
descended on Gaza from illegal West Bank outposts, setting
up in an abandoned hotel, which they dubbed “the
Song of the Sea.” They sat undisturbed for a month,
writing obscene graffiti about Muhammad to provoke the
nearby Arabs. They were determined, they said, to stay
in Gaza until the cancellation of disengagement or death.
Pundits trembled at the prospect of civil war.

The turning point came on a day when other opponents
of disengagement blocked the country’s highways.
The Kahanists had a brawl with the Arabs they had managed
to provoke. At zero range they stoned – on camera
–a young Palestinian who had already been knocked
unconscious. The public backed away in revulsion. Feeling
new wind in his sails, PM Ariel Sharon took action the
next morning: the army surrounded the “Song of the
Sea.”

The rest was anticlimax. Finding no support from their
settler colleagues, the Kahanists turned in their weapons.
Then elite army units entered the hotel and carried them
to buses. No Masada. The threat of civil war evaporated.
De-gunned, the settlers turned to sheep.

On the following day (July 1), in Yediot Aharonot, Gideon
Maron and Oded Shalom wrote: “The right-wing extremists
who barricaded themselves in Gush Katif could have been
reined in a month ago. The army knew this but turned a
blind eye, acting only yesterday, after blood was spilled.”

The month-long wait served to build up the drama, which
Sharon needs. In order to serve his long-range policy
aim, disengagement must take on mythic proportions. The
greater the resistance against it, the more impossible
it will seem to follow it with any Act II. That’s
why he doesn’t do what Charles De Gaulle did with
the French settlers in Algeria, fixing a date to pull
out the army and saying that any settler who wants to
remain in Gaza may apply to the Palestinian Authority.
Rather, he needs the brouhaha as a doorstop: ‘This
far we shall go, no farther. We can’t. Look how
traumatic it is! Even this much has torn us apart!’

The financial aspect reinforces our
suspicion. Dan Ben David, a lecturer on Public Economics
at Tel Aviv University, has written that the purely civilian
costs of the disengagement plan amount to 5.5 billion
shekels, or an average of $611,000 per family. The 7000
Gaza settlers are 3% of the total settler population (not
including occupied Jerusalem). At sums like this, how
could the State afford additional traumas? Never.

SHARON'S present deeds are designed to improve his chances
in the next round of elections. With 1.5 million fewer
Palestinians under Israel’s responsibility, and
as the only Israeli leader capable of evacuating settlers,
he can offer his candidacy for the Nobel Prize. At the
same time he can posture as the champion of the right
wing, the man who saved the important West Bank settlements
from the threat of dismantlement.

But there is also a new round of fighting at the door.
The political situation is clearer now – and worse
for the Palestinians – than during the Oslo years.
Then they signed an agreement that was open-ended, assuring
them nothing. The accord was full of holes that each side
could fill as it wished. Israel could claim that it had
not yielded on the issues of settlements, Jerusalem or
the right of return. The Palestinians could claim the
opposite. It took each seven years to understand where
the other side stood. Even now the Oslo agreement is obscure
enough to inspire the most varied interpretations. The
Disengagement Plan, on the contrary, leaves no room for
doubt: Sharon repeatedly brandishes the promise he got
from US President G. W. Bush: that the major settlement
blocs are off the agenda. Thus he advances toward his
real program: to separate Gaza from the West Bank.

The left-wing parties in the Knesset drift, meanwhile,
toward oblivion. This applies both to Meretz-Yahad, which
gives Sharon a parliamentary umbrella from outside his
government, and also to Labor, which is inside. Professor
Shlomo Ben Ami, who was part of the Israeli team at Camp
David in July 2000, criticizes the Disengagement Plan
as a patchwork leading nowhere: “Its backers don’t
see it as a component in a broader plan for a political
arrangement that will bring Israel to permanent recognized
borders. In the final analysis, two senior politicians
in Israel today, Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres, are partners
in the concept that Israel does not need to advance toward
a permanent arrangement and an end to the conflict.”
(Haaretz June 30.)

Laborites like to boast that Sharon is implementing their
platform, but that is at best an illusion, at worst sheer
fraud. Labor is merely preparing its seats in the next
government, which it hopes Sharon will assemble –
and not Binyamin Netanyahu. It has backed away from the
challenge of building an alternative to the Likud.

THE OBSESSIVE preoccupation with the misery of the settler-evacuees,
and with the difficulties faced by Sharon, conceals what
is happening in the background. After seven months as
PA President, Abu Mazen has reached the end of his rope.
He never quite understood that disengagement curtails
his days. After Israel has left Gaza, it won’t need
him anymore. Many, it is true, still wag their fingers
at him, complaining that he ought to collect the weapons
of Hamas, but this is a smoke screen. Since the start
of the second Intifada, Israel has known that it must
not place its security in the hands of a Palestinian authority.
Where the border between Gaza and Egypt is concerned,
for instance, it wants Egypt to police it, not the PA,
and it is now engaged in the final stages of a deal.

The army waits eagerly for the first
Kassam rocket that will fall after disengagement. It will
then demonstrate that by getting rid of the settlements,
it has improved its military position. It will be able
to invade the Strip by land, sea and air without having
first to take account of a vulnerable Jewish population
there.

It is not just Israel, however, that will undermine Abu
Mazen. Hamas has rejected his call to join his government.
Thus it expressed its annoyance with him for delaying
the parliamentary elections. Hamas understands why Abu
Mazen wants it inside: so that he can avoid the moment
of truth at the polling booth. Hamas also knows where
its power resides. It is waiting for disengagement so
that it can pluck the fruits by taking command of the
Strip. There is a whiff of historical dialectic in this:
Sharon, it would seem, is improving the position of Hamas!

The proponents of disengagement are wrong. The US is
wrong in telling Abu Mazen to refrain from making conditions
and simply allow Israel to leave. Abu Mazen is wrong to
sit on his hands while Israel secures the tools it needs
to continue ruling the West Bank. And finally, Sharon
and his supporters are wrong. Their Disengagement Plan
contains the seed of the third Intifada. The Palestinian
people will not accept the new reality imposed by Israel:
the imprisonment of millions, without means of livelihood,
behind a fictive border of separation enhanced by actual
fences and walls. The flames of the third Intifada will
overcome all fences and walls.

We feel that it is
urgent and necessary to raise the alarm regarding what
may come during and after evacuation of Jewish settlers
from the Gaza Strip occupied by Israel in 1967, in the
event that the evacuation is implemented.

We held back on getting this statement published and
circulated, seeking additional feedback from our peers.
The publication in Ha'aretz (22 June 2005) quoting statements
by General (Reserves) Eival Giladi, the head of the Coordination
and Strategy team of the Prime Minister's Office, motivated
us not to delay publication and circulation any further.
Confirming our worst fears, General
(Res.) Eival Giladi went on record in print and on television
to the effect that "Israel will act in a very resolute
manner in order to prevent terror attacks and [militant]
fire while the disengagement is being implemented"
and that "If pinpoint response proves insufficient,
we may have to use weaponry that causes major collateral
damage, including helicopters and planes, with mounting
danger to surrounding people."

We believe that one primary, unstated
motive for the determination of the government of the
State of Israel to get the Jewish settlers of the Qatif
(Katif) settlement block out of the Gaza Strip may be
to keep them out of harm's way when the Israeli government
and military possibly trigger an intensified mass attack
on the approximately one and a half million Palestinians
in the Gaza Strip, of whom about half are 1948 Palestine
refugees.

The scenario could be similar to what has already happened
in the past - a tactic that Ariel Sharon has used many
times in his military career - i.e.,
utilizing provocation in order to launch massive attacks.

Following this pattern, we believe that Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon and Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz are considering
to utilize provocation for vicious attacks in the near
future on the approximately one and a half million Palestinian
inhabitants of the Gaza Strip: a possible combination
of intensified state terror and mass killing. The Israeli
army is not likely to risk the kind of casualties to its
soldiers that would be involved in employing ground troops
on a large scale in the Gaza Strip. With General Dan Halutz
as Chief of Staff they don't need to. It was General Dan
Halutz, in his capacity as Commander of the Israeli Air
Force, who authorized the bombing of a civilian Gaza City
quarter with a bomb weighing one ton, and then went on
record as saying that he sleeps well and that the only
thing he feels when dropping a bomb is a slight bump of
the aircraft.

The initiators of this alarm have been active for many
decades in the defence of human rights inside the State
of Israel and beyond. We do not have the academic evidence
to support our feeling, but given past behavior, ideological
leanings and current media spin initiated by the Israeli
government and military, we believe that the designs of
the State of Israel are clear, and we submit that our
educated intuition with matters pertaining to the defence
of human rights has been more often correct than otherwise.

We urge all those who share the concern above to add
their names to ours and urgently give this alarm as wide
a circulation as possible.

Circulating and publishing this text
may constitute a significant factor in deterring the Israeli
government, thus protecting the Palestinian population
in the Gaza Strip from this very possible catastrophe
and contributing to prevent yet more war crimes from occurring.

WE WOULD ALSO APPRECIATE RECEIVING NOTIFICATION IF THE
ALARM WAS PUBLISHED IN ANY MEDIA AND/OR IF IT WAS SENT
TO A GROUP DISTRIBUTION LIST.

Comment:
The writers end this plea with a call to circulating the
petition. They want to believe that "Circulating
and publishing this text may constitute a significant
factor in deterring the Israeli government", which
as far as we can tell is wishful thinking in the extreme.
Since when has Sharon ever let other people's opinions
influence him? He and Bush are peas in a pod when it comes
to listening. If he appears to take them into account,
it is only to organise the kind of "provocation"
this article so well describes. But why not circulate
it? In an open universe, every movement of the butterfly's
wings has potential.

But if the writers are engaged in wishful thinking about
the outcome, they are very likely absolutely correct about
Sharon's intentions. Clearing the Gaza strip of Israeli
settlers opens the area up for some serious military action,
without worrying about "collateral damage" of
settlers.

What can be done about this? If you were a Palestinian
living in Gaza, what would you do? What are your possibilities?

What hope would you have for a life for your children?
If you saw your homes and farms destroyed, your families
murdered, wouldn't you consider taking up arms to fight
back?

However, if you consider the question from a larger perspective,
that of the future of the planet as a whole given climate
change and the high probability that in several years
there will not be enough food to feed the earth's people,
if you consider that whether or not oil is running out,
we are being conditioned to think that it is, and that
there will likely be energy shortages as well as climate
change (and how will we heat our homes?), if you consider
the heating up of the ring of fire in the Pacific and
of the possibility of other tsunamis or major earthquakes,
then in a certain sense our future is not much different
than that of the Palestinians. And we haven't even mentioned
the possibility of the neo-con "clash of civilisations"
becoming real, and it coming "home" to the USA
with American blood, not just Arab, being shed. Of course,
to suggest such a thing is to open yourself up to criticism
because some people don't see the real dangers ahead and
would think that we were belittling the situation confronting
the Palestinians. On the contrary, we think the situation
is dire for everyone.

We're all in hot water and the temperature is rising
daily.

And with the world in the hands of psychopaths, it isn't
about to change.

Two Israel Defense
Forces soldiers from an infantry regiment of ultra-Orthodox
troops were arrested on suspicion of placing a fake bomb
at the Jerusalem central bus station last week, it emerged
on Monday. A Jerusalem court extended the remand of the
two soldiers by eight days.

According to police, the two Nahal Haredi unit soldiers,
both 20 years of age, used their uniform to smuggle into
the complex a bag containing the device. It was also said
that the suspects were caught on security cameras at the
station, and were detained following a joint investigation
of Israel Police and Military Police.

During the course of the investigation, police discovered
that the two suspects entered the station through the
Jaffa Street entrance at approximately 6 P.M.

The primary suspect is said to have carried a military
backpack containing the dummy bomb. A few minutes later,
he was met by his accomplice who entered the station.
Both men proceeded upstairs to the third floor men's room,
where they left the bag.

The fake bomb placed by the suspects to protest against
the disengagement, included a bag with a gas balloon,
a clock and some wires. A note was also placed in the
bag reading "the disengagement will blow up in our
faces."

Passersby who noticed the 12-kilogram canister called
the police, who sealed off the bus station for more than
an hour before determining that the device was harmless.
Traffic quickly jammed the area around the bus station
and the entrance to the city, and bus service was interrupted.

After an intensive investigation during which authorities
succeeded in conclusively ascertaining the identity of
the two suspects, one of the suspects was arrested in
his Jerusalem apartment while the other was taken into
custody at his army base.

Security is high at the bus station, which routinely
X-rays packages and requires people to pass through a
metal detector.

Since the beginning of March, right-wing extremists
have planted six dummy bombs: two in a Tel Aviv train
station and four in Jerusalem. In those incidents the
fake bombs also bore notes reading, "The disengagement
will explode in our faces."

Israeli
occupation forces are preventing Palestinians from passing
through gates in the separation barrier to work their
farms, according to a human rights activist.

Khalid Yassin of Ram Allah Human Rights Centre told Aljazeera.net
on Tuesday that farmers in the West Bank village of Mas'ha
had in effect been banned from their properties since
4 July due to the closure of Gate 46.

"Entry was always difficult - Israeli troops only
allowed access at a couple of times during the day.

"But now occupation forces have shut the gate for
good, even though cattle still need to graze and crops
need to be tended to. The olive harvest in October and
November will be impossible," Yassin said.

No access

Yassin added that other gates, such
as Gate 45, had been shut for more than 18 months and
that farmers had no practicable access to their own land
or any say about who might have access to it on the other
side of the wall.

"Soldiers told people in Mas'ha to use Gate 48 -
which is an 11km walk. Is it reasonable to expect farmers
to walk 44km every day just to visit their own farms on
the other side of the wall?

"In any case, they will not have the right permits
to enter 48 - and will have next to no chance of successfully
obtaining one," Yassin concluded.

Delayed response

Aljazeera.net contacted Israel's District Coordination
Office in Qalqilya, the Civil Administration and a spokesman
for Israeli occupation forces to explain why Gate 46 was
shut.

No one could give an immediate response.

The separation wall was built through
the Palestinian village of Mas'ha in September 2003.

The built-up residential and business
areas ended up on one side, with 92% (or 5700 dunams)
of the agricultural land on the other.

Comment:
While Israel claims the apartheid wall is there to ensure
its security, the facts on the ground speak to other intentions:
to uproot the Palestinians from their land and drive them
out. That is why the wall was built well inside the green
line. It amounts to de facto expropriation and seizure
of land. Of course, the entire history of Jewish settlements
in Palestine is one long, drawn out process of stealing
land from its original inhabitants.

Israel was created following WWII under the banner of
giving the Jews a land where they would be safe. How ironic
is it that the leaders of this country behave in ways
to ensure that their population is reviled, where there
have been decades of fighting, where Israelis are targets
of attacks both from Palestinians attempting to free their
land and from Israeli intelligence agencies operating
suicide bombers to maintain the level of fear and justify
ever increasing repression.

Because of the existence of Israel, the Middle East is
a proverbial powder keg, and whether it is conventional
weapons, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, or ethnic
specific weapons, one day it is going to blow, taking
not only the new "demons", the Arabs, but also
the Israelis. Reflecting on the probability of such an
explosion bearing in mind the collaboration of the Zionists
with Hitler and the Nazis to populate Palestine in the
thirties, leads to some interesting conclusions.

JERUSALEM - Israeli troops remained
poised for a possible ground assault in the Gaza Strip
to end Palestinian rocket attacks as 20,000 security
officers braced for a mass rally against the Gaza pullout.

For a second day running, thousands
of extra soldiers and armoured vehicles remained deployed
across the border with Gaza, awaiting the green light
for a threatened large-scale assault, should rocket
attacks continue.

Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas has said he is determined
to stop militant strikes "at all costs" while
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said there was no restriction
on Israel's defence establishment to halt them.

On Monday, a close aide to Sharon reiterated that Palestinian
attacks would not be allowed to hinder next month's
historic Gaza pullout, but appeared to rule out a full-on
offensive until diplomatic efforts had been exhausted.

"We don't want an escalation and we are taking
into account the position of our friends," he said,
alluding to the expected arrival of US Secretary Condoleezza
Rice later this week and Egyptian mediators holding
talks in Gaza.

Prime minister Ahmed Qorei said that the Palestinian
administration was determined to impose order after
talks with Egypt's deputy intelligence chief, Mustafa
al-Buheiri, in Gaza to help restore a troubled seven-month-old
truce.

"We want to impose the rule of law, we want security
for our people," Qorei told reporters, warning
that any Israeli ground offensive would "create
a very serious problem, not to us only, to us and to
Israel and to the region".

Buheiri was locked in meetings with representatives
of most armed groups and the governing Fatah party,
after meeting Hamas on Sunday.

The Islamist movement -- the principal group behind
rocket attacks -- said it remained committed to the
informal cool down, but reiterated that it reserved
the right to retaliate for Israeli fire.

The level of violence appeared to
have scaled back, with only one mortar round and one
anti-tank shell fired on Israeli targets in the Gaza
Strip since day break, the army said.

Six suspected Hamas militants were arrested overnight
in the
West Bank.

Around 20,000 police and soldiers
were deployed in southern Israel to prevent thousands
of opponents of the Gaza pullout from holding a mass
protest rally later. [...]

Security forces are under strict orders from Sharon
to prevent the protestors from reaching the border crossing
between Israel and the Gaza Strip in a bid to force
their way into the sealed-off Jewish settlements.

Ultra-nationalist opponents of the pullout -- due to
begin on August 17 -- have vowed to impede the withdrawal
by flooding the settlements with radicals bent on sabotaging
the evacuation.

With chances of success practically
zero, the authorities fear extremists will resort to
increasingly radical tactics, leaving the threat of
violence looming over the rally.

Although organisers from the Yesha
settlers' council have called for a peaceful protest
and are banking on a turnout of around 100,000, the
liberal newspaper Haaretz warned that "violence
will be virtually unavoidable".

Police have refused permission for the rally to near
Kissufim with access to the settlements barred to all
except residents, journalists and security personnel.

"We will try to get to Kissufim by every means
possible without resorting to violence and to join our
brethren in Gush Katif, who are under blockade,"
said Yesha spokesman Emilie Amroussi.

LONDON - British Prime Minister
Tony Blair came under fresh pressure for supporting
the Iraq war after a respected think-tank linked the
invasion to Britain's worst terror attack in which at
least 55 people died.

The comments -- rejected by
the government -- came as interior minister Charles
Clarke prepared to meet his opposition counterparts
to discuss planned anti-terrorism laws, and as
a global hunt for clues into who planned the July 7
bombings in London forged on.

The Royal Institute of International
Affairs, known as Chatham House, concluded in a report
that the war in Iraq gave a "boost" to Al-Qaeda
and made Britain especially vulnerable to attacks
-- a theory that clashed with Blair's belief that there
is no link with the July 7 bombings.

"There is no doubt that the situation over Iraq
has imposed particular difficulties for the UK, and
for the wider coalition against terrorism," said
the London-based research centre in its study, "Riding
Pillion for Tackling Terrorism is a High-risk Policy".

"It gave a boost to the Al-Qaeda network's propaganda,
recruitment and fundraising," Chatham House said,
arguing that it also provided an ideal training area
for Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists and deflected resources
that could have gone to help bring terror mastermind
Osama bin Laden to justice. [...]

The
government is in talks with opposition parties to win
support for new terror laws in the wake of the London
bombings.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke is meeting his Conservative
and Liberal Democrat counterparts to thrash out details
of the proposed legislation.

A series of consultative meetings are taking place throughout
the week.

Mr Clarke, David Davis and Mark Oaten will discuss new
offences of preparing, training for and inciting terror
acts.

Opposition support

The opposition parties support the new proposals in principle,
but want to discuss the details with Mr Clarke.

The talks come as a report says the UK's involvement
in the Iraq invasion heightened the risk of attacks.

Supporting the US-led invasion of Iraq put the UK more
at risk from terrorist attack, the Royal Institute of
International Affairs and the Economic and Social Research
Council said.

The report also said the invasion boosted al-Qaeda's
recruitment and fund-raising.

Conservative shadow home secretary Mr Davis wants to
look again at using phone tap evidence in court, BBC political
correspondent James Landale said.

Consensus

Party leader Michael Howard said: "I do hope we
can reach agreement with the government - that remains
to be seen.

"We will obviously have to look at the details of
what they propose, but we shall be approaching these meetings,
these discussions, in a spirit of consensus."

Mr Oaten told the BBC he was concerned about how incitement
to terrorism will be defined.

"Are we talking about speeches,
articles? What are the kind of words that somebody would
use which could then be implied to be incitement?"
he said.

"This will be hard legislation
to draft, and of course, we don't want to introduce legislation
which could then have the knock on consequences that we
hadn't really thought about."

Costly surveillance

On Sunday it emerged one of the London bombers was investigated
by MI5 last year but was deemed not to be a threat.

Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, was subject to a routine assessment
by the security service because of an indirect connection
to an alleged terror plot.

He was one of hundreds investigated but was not considered
a risk by the security services.

More than 50 people died and 700 were injured in the
blasts. Four bombers are also believed to have died."

Khan, from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, killed himself and
six other passengers in the Edgware Road bombing on the
London underground.

Hasib Hussain, 18, from Holbeck, Leeds was responsible
for the Number 30 bus bombing, in which 13 people died;
Shehzad Tanweer, 22, from Beeston in Leeds for the Aldgate
Tube blast, which killed six, and Germaine Lindsay, 19,
from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, for the King's Cross
Tube explosion in which 26 people were killed.

Former Scotland Yard Commander Roy Ramm told the BBC
the news about Khan and MI5 was not surprising.

"It doesn't surprise me that this man has been identified
in MI5's operation because this thing is like concentric
circles, the further out they are the less likely MI5
are to have resources that they can apply to them in terms
of surveillance, and surveillance is very costly."

Comment:
First, once any legislation is put into place that impinges
on the rights of citizens, it will be used by the powers
that be to go further than we could imagine. The Patriot
Act in the United States is now being used to detain US
citizens with no charges being brought forward.

Second, where is the evidence that the four men accused
were in fact the bombers? We are still waiting, four years
after the fact, for the US government to provide hard
evidence that the 19 men they accuse of hijacking the
planes on 9/11 were actually the perpetrators. That seven
of the men are still alive should provoke questions as
to the identities of the others.

It has been established way beyond any reasonable doubt
that Bush and Blair lied prior to the invasion of Iraq.
Why should we trust what they say now?

A photo from closed circuit television showing one of
the accused with a backpack doesn't prove anything. They
could be patsies, set up in the way Oswald was used for
the assassination of JFK.

The only sure thing is that the Blair government will
use this opportunity to pass more "anti-terrorist"
legislation, that they will try and impose a national
ID card with arguments that it will make us safer.

A federal
appeals court yesterday backed the Bush administration's
plan to let special panels of military officers conduct
trials of terrorism suspects detained in the U.S. military
prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, overturning a lower-court
decision that has blocked the "military commissions"
for the past eight months.

The decision clears the way for the Defense Department
to use the commissions to try some of the hundreds of
detainees at Guantanamo Bay. It was hailed by Attorney
General Alberto R. Gonzales yesterday as affirming
the president's "critical authority" to determine
how to try detainees deemed "enemy combatants"
in the war on terrorism.

The ruling was an important test
of the government's strategy of denying such detainees
access not only to civilian courts but also to the more
formal proceedings of military courts-martial, in which
they would enjoy additional rights and legal protections.
One of the judges on the deciding panel from the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,
John G. Roberts, is said to be on the administration's
list of possible Supreme Court nominees.

The decision followed an appeal by the Justice Department
of a district court decision last November that had blocked
a military commission trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, 34,
a Yemeni mechanic with a fourth-grade education who admits
that he served as Osama bin Laden's driver. Hamdan has
been detained in Guantanamo Bay for the past 17 months
and accused of being a member of al Qaeda. Three other
detainees have been designated to stand trial before military
commissions.

The lower court had concluded that Hamdan
and others at Guantanamo Bay are entitled to hearings
in advance of a criminal trial in which military officers
would decide whether they qualified as prisoners of war.
This procedure is required by the Geneva Conventions,
the international treaties that protect people detained
by military forces.

Prisoners of war are supposed to be tried in courts-martial
rather than by the less formal military commissions. Hamdan,
who has claimed that he took his job solely for money
and not for ideology, has sought a court-martial. But
the administration has vigorously sought to avoid courts-martial,
which have rules that make it more difficult to keep defendants
from knowing all the evidence against them.

The appellate court swept aside the lower
court's decision in what amounted to a general endorsement
of a legal theory that the president has broad powers
under the Constitution to decide how military detainees
are to be handled during a time of conflict.

"On the merits, there is little to Hamdan's argument"
that the president's establishment of the commissions
illegally tramples the prerogatives of Congress, the three-member
panel said in a decision written by Judge A. Raymond Randolph
and joined by Roberts and Senior Judge Stephen F. Williams.

The panel said courts should defer to
President Bush's decision in 2002 that the Geneva Conventions
do not apply to detainees Bush declares as enemy combatants
and that, in any event, the conventions are not enforceable
by U.S. courts in lawsuits brought by foreigners.

"This decision is a major win for the Administration,"
a Justice Department news release said. The Defense Department
itself declined to comment.

Hamdan's lead civilian counsel, Georgetown
University professor Neal Katyal, denounced the decision
as "contrary to 200 years of constitutional law."
He said it "places absolute trust in the president,
unchecked by the Constitution, statutes of Congress and
longstanding treaties." He added that it undermines
the protections of the Geneva Conventions in ways that
could harm U.S. interests in the future.

Katyal expressed particular concern over
what he described as the panel's conclusion that the president
can "set up an entire architecture of justice as
he sees fit," and that under the military's rules
for the commissions, those on trial could be forced to
leave the room while the proceedings against them continue.
Noting that he has not even been allowed to speak to his
client, Katyal said the decision will be appealed.

The legal battle, being waged on terrain scarcely visited
by U.S. courts in the past century, has been closely watched
by human rights advocates, legal scholars, British and
European Union parliamentarians, and current and former
military lawyers -- including many who submitted their
own briefs.

Passions on both sides have run high. The Justice Department
argued in April that if the commissions are not allowed
to go forward, security breaches could result and the
war on terrorism could be slowed.

Hamdan's military lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift,
last year denounced the commission set up to try him as
a "kangaroo court." Seven retired senior military
officers and lawyers warned in a joint statement that
if the commissions are allowed to proceed unchecked, foreign
tyrants will organize similar court hearings for U.S.
military personnel and "hide their oppression under
U.S. precedent."

A group of 305 current and former European politicians,
who asserted that they span "the political spectrum,"
said in their court brief that letting
the commissions proceed as planned would place the United
States in breach of international law and undermine the
due process rights of individuals affected by the war
on terrorism.

The new ruling is the first in which the administration's
plan for using military commissions to conduct criminal
trials has been reviewed at the appellate level. It carries
less weight than if it had come from a full appellate
court.

Comment:
So we have a decision that:

"places absolute trust in the president, unchecked
by the Constitution, statutes of Congress and longstanding
treaties" and allows the president to "set
up an entire architecture of justice as he sees fit".

which reminds of of this idea expressed by Bush on numerous
occasions:

It would be a heck of a lot easier to be a dictator
than work in a democracy. (1996 - referenced in J.H.
Hatfield's "Fortunate Son", when Dubya was
governor of Texas - date unknown)

You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship
would be a lot easier. (Jul. 1, 1998)

If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot
easier... just so long as I'm the dictator. (shortly
after his contentious victory in the Supreme Court that
resulted in his becoming president - Dec. 18, 2000)

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's
no question about it. (Jul. 26, 2001)

It's not a dictatorship in Washington, but I tried
to make it one in that instance. We are beginning to
see some success in opening up federal coffers for faith-based
programs. (Jan. 15, 2004)

Bush's ponderings on how much easier things would be
if he had total power appear to be recurring, something
of an idée-fixe, perhaps even an obsession.
His actions certainly go in this direction as he is mean-spirited
and unable to forgive or forget if someone crosses him.
The accumulation of power in the office of the president
since Bush took over and arranged to have himself doted
with the honours of the commander in chief thanks to 9/11
will remain even if Bush's handlers decide to replace
him with another. The fascist takeover is all be complete,
just awaiting the moment to shed its last skins of democracy
- another terror attack perhaps. Then, again, given the
lack of organised opposition to the Bush regime, there
may never need to be such open declaration of tyranny.
As long as the black forces can do as they please, there
is no need to push things further. The slow burn is working
so well.

The neo-cons have no love for democracy. Michael Ledeen
is a prominent member of the neo-cons, and his reflections
on politics in the following article should be considered
when looking at what has happened in the US under Bush.

Would you be surprised
to find that a man who was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra
scandal during the Reagan Administration, a man who is the
darling of the Bush White House and is an adviser to Karl
Rove, a man who loves Machiavelli and studies him, a neo-conservative
who has close ties to one of America’s leading “Christian”
Dominionists—Pat Robertson, and a man who called Pearl
Harbor “lucky” and a providentially inspired
event—may be the man who is behind the forging of
the Niger documents that convinced America to launch a preemptive
strike against Iraq?

Ian Masters, host of Background Briefing, in Los Angeles,
interviewed Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of Counterterrorism
operations at the CIA. Cannistraro came close to naming
the man who forged the Niger documents. When Masters asked,
“If I said ‘Michael Ledeen’?”
Vincent Cannistraro replied, “You’d be very
close.”

Who is Michael Ledeen? Or perhaps more importantly, what
does he believe? Here are just a few quotes from his book,
Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s
Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries
Ago. (Truman Talley Books (St. Martin’s Press),
1999.) Ledeen wrote:

“When Jimmy Carter was president, he was so
appalled by the assassinations that had been carried
out by American officers and agents that he issued a
stern executive order forbidding the practice. This
had the unanticipated consequence of favoring the forces
of evil, because we could not go after individual terrorists….In
his moralistic attempt to make murder less likely, Carter
made it more likely, by both our enemies and ourselves.”
(pp. 94-95)

“There are several circumstances in which good
leaders are likely to have to enter into evil: whenever
the very existence of the nation is threatened; when
the state is first created or revolutionary change is
to be accomplished; when removing an evil tyrant; and
when the society becomes corrupt and must be restored
to virtue…Saving a state that has sunk into corruption
is Machiavelli’s most passionate concern…”
(pp. 101-102)

“Moses created a new state and a new religion,
which makes him one of the most revolutionary leaders
of all time…The execution of the sinners was necessary
to confirm Moses’ authority.” (pp. 102-103)

“The winning formula is threefold: good laws,
good arms, good religion. We are back to Moses.”
(p. 111)

“Good religion teaches men that politics is
the most important enterprise in the eyes of God. Like
Moses, Machiavelli wants the law of his state to be
seen, and therefore obeyed, as divinely ordered. The
combination of fear of God and fear of punishment—duly
carried out with good arms—provides the necessary
discipline for good government.”(pp. 117-118)

“American evangelical Christianity is the sort
of ‘good religion’ Machiavelli calls for.
The evangelicals do not quietly accept their destiny,
believing instead they are called upon to fight corruption
and reestablish virtue.” (p. 159)

“Once corruption has taken hold of a free nation,
it is headed toward tyranny.” (p. 172)

Notice that in the next quote, Ledeen’s presupposition
is that only liberals are “corrupt.” He criticized
Bob Dole and Jack Kemp in 1996 for refusing to attack
Bill Clinton’s character during the campaign.

“Refusing to hold public officials accountable
for their corrupt practices reinforces the people’s
perception that turpitude and power are inextricably
linked, and undermines even the best laws and institutions.
Inevitably, with the passage of time, liberty itself
is crushed.” (p. 173)

“Paradoxically, preserving
liberty may require the rule of a single leader—a
dictator—willing to use those dreaded ‘extraordinary
measures, which few know how, or are willing, to employ.’
(p. 173)

“Machiavelli…has not lost his democratic
faith. His call for a brief period of iron rule is a
choice of the lesser of two evils: if the corruption
continued, a real tyranny would
be just a matter of time (making it even harder to restore
free institutions), whereas freedom can be preserved
if a good man can be found to put the state back in
order. Just as it is sometimes necessary temporarily
to resort to evil actions to achieve worthy objectives,
so a period of dictatorship is sometimes the only hope
for freedom.” (p. 174)

“Machiavelli’s favorite hero…Moses
exercised dictatorial power, but that awesome power
was used to create freedom.” (p. 174)

“We should not be outraged
by Machiavelli’s call for a temporary dictatorship
as an effective means to either revivify or restore
freedom.” (p. 174)

Speaking of Germany following W.W. II, Ledeen wrote:

“We ‘denazified’ the country, hung
many of the major leaders of the Third Reich, and forced
all adults to answer detailed questionnaires about their
activities and associations during Hitler’s rule.”
We barred from positions of power and civic influence
those who had actively participated in the Nazi regime.”
(p. 175)

It would be foolish for America’s political strategists
and congressional leaders to ignore Michael Ledeen and
his interpretation of Machiavelli. Mr. Ledeen speaks from
the cutting edge of a group of men and women who desire
nothing more than to reconstruct America in their own
image. This nation is in grave danger. Ledeen belongs
to a group of men, including Harry Jaffa, Pat Robertson,
Willmoore Kendall to Allan Bloom, who, according to Shadia
Drury, scholar and author of Leo Strauss and the American
Right, share “the view that America is too liberal
and pluralistic and that what it needs is a single orthodoxy
that governs the public and private lives of its citizens.”[1]

The belief in a single voice that governs
the public should cause all Americans to understand these
men want to convert this nation to a permanent dictatorship.
Their inspirer was Leo Strauss, a professor who taught
Machiavellian methods to many of them at the University
of Chicago. In fact, Paul Wolfovitz earned his doctorate
under Strauss and many of the neo-cons in the White House
studied under him. Strauss believed every society needs
a “single public orthodoxy.” As Drury put
it, “a set of ideas that defines what is true and
false, right and wrong, noble and base.” Strauss
believed that the role of religion was indispensable to
the political success of a nation. For a political society
had to hold together and act as a unit in lock step with
the leader. Strauss believed that religion was the means
to inculcate the desired ideas into the minds of the masses.
He didn’t care what religion—just as long
as it was a religion that could link itself to the political
order.

Michael Ledeen singled out the evangelicals as most like
the “Machiavellian” model described by Strauss.
Evangelicals, while decrying the aberrant power of a Jim
Jones over his congregation, have always had little Jim
Joneses telling them what to do and how to live from their
pulpits all over America. Evangelicals thirst for power,
submit to power, and now are harnessed to a power that
is driving them toward the completion of the take over
of the USA. Our only hope is to wake up the churches and
call them to repentance. And the irony is, as Ledeen points
out, if we will stand up and attack the immorality and
corruption within the Republican Party, which has reached
the lowest depths in the history of our nation, and which
the GOP supports, the bedraggled verbally abused Democrats
will sit up and notice at long last that they are recognized
as the moral leaders they have always been. What Leo Strauss
and Michael Ledeen and the other dominionists really hate,
is the loving Christian ethics that established FDR's
New Deal. You see, the great success of Christian liberalism
is that it threatens their greed and that’s what
the fight is all about.

[1] Leo Strauss and the American Right
by Shadia Drury, St. Martin’s Press, 1999, New York.

Treason, no less! A
leading Democrat, Rep Henry Waxman howls in Congress that
"The intentional disclosure of a covert CIA agent's
identity would be an act of treason. If Rove was part
of a conspiracy and intentionally disclosed the name ­
then that jeopardizes national security"

Liberal columnists like Robert Scheer of the Los
Angeles Times join the Waxman chorus. Of White House
political adviser Karl Rove's efforts to discredit Joe
Wilson by outing his wife Valerie Plame as a covert CIA
employee, Scheer bellows furiously that that Rove might
have even endangered Plame's life and that "this
partisan game jeopardizes national security. This is the
most important issue raised by the Plame scandal."

But suppose one of Valerie Plame's covert CIA missions,
until outed by Karl Rove, had been to liaise with Venezuelan
right-wingers planning to assassinate president Hugo Chavez,
possibly masquerading as a journalist and using her attractions
to secure an audience with the populist president and
then poison him, just as the CIA tried to poison Castro.
In an earlier incarnation Scheer would surely have been
eager to jeopardize national security by exposing Plame's
employer.

Thirty-eight years ago Scheer was one of the editors
of Ramparts and in February of 1967 that magazine
ran an expose of covert CIA funding of the National Student
Association, prompting furious charges that it had endangered
national security which, from the foreign policy establishment's
point of view, it most certainly had. Of
course Ramparts, and the left in general, derided
the very phrase "national security" as a phony
rationale for covering up years of covert CIA operations
entirely inimical to any decent definition of what "national
security" should properly mean.

The CIA's covert wing is not in the business
of advancing world peace and general prosperity. The record
of almost 60 years is one of uninterrupted evil. So we
should drop all this nonsense about treason and clap Rove
warmly on the back for his courageous onslaughts on the
cult of secrecy. By all means delight in the White House's
discomfiture, but spare us the claptrap about national
security and treason.

To thread one's way through coverage of the Plame affair,
the jailing of Judy Miller, the contempt citations of
four journalists (though not,alas, of Jeff Gerth of the
New York Times) and the AIPAC/Franklin spy case
is like strolling past distorting mirrors in a fun house.
Go from one to the next and the swollen giant of "treason"
in the west wing of the White House shrinks to the dwarf-like
status of a "leak", which is how AIPAC's defenders
like to categorize the transmission of a top secret Presidential
Directive on Iran from Larry Franklin in the Pentagon
to AIPAC officials and thence to a spymaster, Naor Gilon,
in the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Judy Miller too has had an image
make-over, from the warmongering fabricator of yesterday
to today's martyr to the First Amendment, with
years of profitable speaking tours beckoning after she
is released from the incarceration she surely knew would
winch her reputation out of the mud.

But why is prosecutor Fitzgerald going after her? She
wrote no story about Plame.

Now, as a prime propagandist of the war faction Miller
had every reason to be as keen to discredit Wilson as
was Rove. Suppose it was she who relayed from her pal
and prime disinformant, Ahmad Chalabi, the news that it
was CIA employee Plame who assigned her husband the Niger
mission to assay the veracity of charges that Iraq had
bought uranium yellowcake there. Relayed to whom? Maybe
to one of the State Department's neocon warmongers, like
John Bolton or EliottAbrams, who duly passed the news
on to Scooter Libby and Rove in the White House. Remember,
Rove told the prosecutor that he learned about Plame from
two journalists. What a joke it would have been to have
him behind bars for refusing to disclose his sources.

Stroll on to the next set of mirrors,
apropos Wen Ho Lee's suit to discover who leaked the false
accusations about his supposed acts of treason at Los
Alamos, allegedly transmitting nuclear secrets to China.
Four journalists, including James Risen of the New
York Times and Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles
Times, may join Miller behind bars for refusing to
divulge their sources.

One can understand why Wen Ho Lee is
unmoved by charges that he is sabotaging the First Amendment.
His case displayed the FBI and the press which smeared
him ­ primarily Risen and Gerth in the New York
Times ­ in a disgusting light. He spent nearly
a year in solitary confinement, with FBI agents telling
him he might face the death penalty for being a traitor.

Who in fact was the betrayer of secrets, if one has to
be found? On July 7 Steve Terrell reported in The
New Mexican that the leaker so eager to disclose
a top secret government probe of Wen Ho Lee at Los Alamos,
may well be a the current governor of New Mexico and possible
White House aspirant, Bill Richardson, who was Clinton's
Energy Secretary at the time and who had spent a large
portion of his political career nurturing the interests
of Los Alamos as a nuclear research lab.

I doubt Waxman will start calling for his blood as a
compromiser of national security, leaking secrets as part
of a political maneuver to shift blame for the appalling
mess at Los Alamos to a person of Chinese origin whom
he falsely accused of being a spy, then denied he had
done any such thing. This guy wants to be president of
the United States.

If you want to start waving words like
"treason" around, the AIPAC spy case is surely
a better target than Karl Rove. Here we have a four-year
FBI probe of possible treachery by senior US government
officials, as well as by Israel's premier lobbying outfit
in the United States, AIPAC. Yet compared with the mileage
given to the Plame affair, coverage of the AIPAC spy case
in the press has been sparse, and the commentary very
demure, until you get to Justin Raimondo's pugnacious
columns on Antiwar.com.

Raimondo's been comparing the AIPAC spy case to the indictment
of State Department official Alger Hiss back in the 1940s,
claiming that just as the foreign policy apparatus was
allegedly riddled with Communist spies in the 1940s, the
same apparatus is now riddled with Israel's agents today.
I'd reckon that when it comes to agents of influence the
USSR back then couldn't hold a candle to Israel today
(or then, for that matter, though in that distant time
Zionist and Communist were often hats on the same head).

One answer in the McCarthyite era to accusations of spying
was that the Soviet Union was an ally and the supposed
transmission of "secrets" was just a routine
exchange of information on such matters as the schedule
for the Dumbarton Oaks conference laying the groundwork
for the UN (in which Hiss was involved.)

Similar talk about "allies" and "routine
exchanges" pops from the mouths of Israel's supporters
here, denouncing the FBI probe as some latterday equivalent
of the persecution of Dreyfus.

It's perfectly obvious that Israel
exerts huge influence on US policy. Men and women working
in Israel's interest throng Washington. But on
the left, in the spy case just as in the Plame affair,
we should be leery of words like traitor and "national
security". They cut both ways.

Here's a useful parable on the fetishization of secrecy.
Jeffrey St Clair unearthed it in Ernie Fitzgerald's The
Pentagonists, essential reading for anyone interested
in how US politics really works.

In 1973, Nixon fired Pentagon auditor Ernie Fitzgerald
for exposing the tidal wave of cost overruns associated
with Lockheed's useless C-5A cargo plane. One of the accusations
hurled against Ernie at the time was that he had "leaked"
to a congressional committee "classified information"
about the scandal. The charge was made by Robert Seamons,
Nixon's Secretary of the Air Force. When Fitzgerald sued
(and won his job back and a major settlement, which he
used in part to found the Fund for Constitutional Government),
his lawyers deposed Seamons, who retreated a little.

Here's how Ernie describes it:

"Later, after I was fired, Senator William Proxmire
forced Seamons to retract this accusation. In his apologia
pro vita sua to the official tape, he produced this
wonderful waffle: 'At the time I was testifying, I really
thought that Ernie had given them classified material,
marked 'Confidential.' Later on, when we still had the
opportunity of going over the testimony, it wasn't so
clear as to whether any of the material was classified
or not. So we changed the word from Confidential with
a capital "C" to confidential with a small
"c".

Comment:
The emphasis on the "national security" aspects
of the Plame affair show how the media works to co-opt
the discussion and keep it within the confines of a discourse
friendly to the powers that be. National security for
the US has become synonymous with national insecurity
for everyone else in the world. As long as the US-centric
discourse continues, Americans will never have the information
necessary to see the real role of their country in the
world over the past decades.

Not that we think there is any hope of this changing....
Just take a gander at the next story....

Most Comcast internet
customers seem to have horror stories, but in my humble
opinion this one is a doozie and may even suggest threats
to freedom of speech more significant than the jailing
of a court stenographer.

I'm working on a campaign headquartered at www.afterdowningstreet.org
that seeks to draw attention to the Downing Street Minutes
and to lobby Congress to open an investigation into whether
the President has committed impeachable offenses. According
to a recent Zogby poll, 42 percent of Americans favor
impeachment proceedings if the President lied about the
reasons for war, and according to a recent ABC News /
Washington Post poll, 52 percent think he did. But this
story is nowhere to be found in the corporate media. So,
our website attracts a lot of traffic.

In addition, July 23rd is the three-year anniversary
of the meeting on Downing Street that produced the now
infamous minutes, and we are organizing events all over
the country on that day. Or, we're trying to. But
we noticed about a week ago that everyone working on this
campaign was having strange Email problems. Some people
would get Emails and some wouldn't, or they'd receive
some but not others. Conference calls were worse
than usual (I can't stand the things anyway) because half
the people wouldn’t get the info and know where
to call in. Organizing by internet is super easy, but
when you have to follow up every Email with a phone call
to see if someone got it, it becomes super frustrating.
Volunteers have been complaining all over the country
– especially now that we've figured out what the
problem was and they know what to complain about.

We didn't know it, but for the
past week, anyone using Comcast has been unable to receive
any Email with "www.afterdowningstreet.org"
in the body of the Email. That has included every
Email from me, since that was in my signature at the bottom
of every Email I sent. And it included any Email linking
people to any information about the upcoming events.

From the flood this evening of Emails saying "Oh,
so that's why I haven't heard anything from you guys lately,"
it seems clear that we would have significantly more events
organized by now for the 23rd if not for this block by
Comcast.

Disturbingly, Comcast did not
notify us of this block. It took us a number of
days to nail down Comcast as the cause of the problems,
and then more days, working with Comcast's abuse department
to identify exactly what was going on. We'd reached that
point by Thursday, but Comcast was slow to fix the problem.

During the day on Friday we escalated our threats to
flood Comcast's executives with phone calls and cancellations,
and we gave them deadlines. Friday evening, Comcast passed
the buck to Symantec. Comcast said
that Symantec's Bright Mail filter was blocking the Emails,
and that Symantec refused to lift the block, because they
had supposedly received 46,000 complaints about Emails
with our URL in them. Forty-six thousand! Of course,
Symantec was working for Comcast, and Comcast could insist
that they shape up, or drop them. But Comcast wasn't interested
in doing that.

Could we see two or three, or even one,
of those 46,000 complaints? No, and Comcast claimed that
Symantec wouldn't share them with Comcast either.

By the time Comcast had passed the buck to the company
that it was paying to filter its customers Emails, Brad
Blog had posted an article about the situation and urged
people to complain to Comcast.
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001602.htm

Brad quickly added Symantec phone numbers to the story
on his website, and we called Symantec's communications
department, which fixed the problem in a matter of minutes.

So, why does this matter?

Comcast has a near monopoly on
high-speed internet service in much of this country,
including much of the Washington, D.C., area. Many members
of the media and many people involved in politics rely
on it. Three days ago, I almost decided to put a satellite
dish on my roof. There's no other way for me to get high-speed
internet, unless I use Comcast.

Comcast effectively censors discussion
of particular political topics, and impedes the ability
of people to associate with each other, with absolutely
no compulsion to explain itself. There is no due process.
A phrase or web address is tried and convicted in absentia
and without the knowledge of those involved.

Now, did Comcast do this because it opposes impeaching
the President? I seriously doubt it. Apparently the folks
at Symantec did this, and Comcast condoned it. But why?

Well, we have no evidence to suggest that these 46,000
complaints actually exist, but we can be fairly certain
that if they do, they were generated by someone politically
opposed to our agenda. There's simply no possible way
that we've accidentally annoyed 46,000 random people with
stray Emails and mistyped addresses. We've only been around
for a month and a half, and we haven't spammed anyone.
In fact, during the course of trying to resolve the problem,
Comcast assured us that they knew we hadn't spammed anyone.
And once we'd gotten Symantec's attention, they didn't
hesitate to lift the block.

But it had taken serious pressure to find out what the
problem was and who to ask for a remedy. We only solved
this because we could threaten a flood of negative attention.

This state of affairs means that anyone
who wants to stifle public and quasi-private discussion
of a topic can quite easily do so by generating numerous
spam complaints. The victims of the complaints will not
be notified, made aware of the accusations against them,
or provided an opportunity to defend themselves. And if
the complaints prove bogus, there will be absolutely no
penalty for having made them.

And this won't affect only small-time information sources.
If the New York Times or CNN attempts to send people Email
with a forbidden phrase, it won't reach Comcast customers
or customers of any ISP using the same or similar filtering
program.

And there is no public list posted anywhere
of which phrases are not permitted. This is a Kafkan world.
This is censorship as it affects a prisoner who sends
out letters and does not know if they will reach the recipient
or be destroyed.

What if I had tried to Email someone about a serious
health emergency during the past week, but they had been
using Comcast and I had been including the address of
my website in my Email signature? Is this not a safety
issue?

Above all, though, this is a First Amendment issue, as
is well laid out in this excerpt of a statement released
today by People-Link.org, the organization hosting the
www.afterdowningstreet.org site:

"This goes far beyond the normal anti-spam measures
taken by major providers and represents an effective blocking
of constitutionally protected expression and the fundamental
right to organize and act politically on issues of concern.

"Most spam blocking measures focus on the email
address or the IP address of the suspected spammer. While
there are anti-spam measures directed at the body of the
email, these usually target attachments that could contain
virus programs.

"Targeting the inclusion of a website url can only
have one outcome: that communications about that website
and the issue it is presenting will be blocked from large
numbers of people and that the communications from that
site's administrators and the campaign's organizers will
not reach their full constituency.

"Whether Comcast's intention or not, this is effectively
political and unconstitutional.

"It keeps people from getting valuable information
about a campaign that is, in the opinion of many, critical
to the future of this country's political system.

"It disrupts the organizing of this campaign and
cripples the campaign's ability to use its most effective
communications tool: the Internet.

"It damages people's confidence in this campaign
since many people who write the campaign can't receive
the response they expect and that the campaign has sent.

"Perhaps the worst part of this development is that
Comcast has been reportedly doing this without the knowledge
of the managers of this website or anyone affiliated with
this campaign. In fact, no Comcast customer has received
any indication that email to him or her containing this
url was blocked."

DAVID SWANSON is a co-founder of After
Downing Street, a writer and activist, and the Washington
Director of Democrats.com. He is a board member of Progressive
Democrats of America, and serves on the Executive Council
of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, TNG-CWA.
He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications
director, with jobs including Press Secretary for Dennis
Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, Media Coordinator
for the International Labor Communications Association,
and three years as Communications Coordinator for ACORN,
the Association of Community Organizations for Reform
Now. Swanson obtained a Master's degree in philosophy
from the University of Virginia in 1997.

Comment:
It is easy to censor the web. Our sites are on restricted
lists for some companies. PayPal has frozen our account
in the past (which is why we no longer use them), and
Google clearly has political censorship in their page
rankings. Bloggers who write against the Bush Reich have
found their pages disappearing from Google returns.

But how does one prove that there is censorship in fact
taking place? With Google, they send an explanation that
they have just changed their algorithms for determining
page ranking, and so how can you prove the new rankings
are politically motivated?

Step back, however, and see the de facto censorship in
the mainstream press, the self-censorship on the part
of journalists who want to keep their jobs, as well as
the curious pages that somehow manage to stay on top no
matter how often the ranking algorithms change, and you
get a wider perspective.

FBI agents monitored Web sites
calling for protests against the 2004 political conventions
in New York and Boston on behalf of the bureau's counterterrorism
unit, according to FBI documents released under the
Freedom of Information Act.

The American Civil Liberties Union pointed to the documents
as evidence that the Bush administration has reacted
to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United
States by blurring the distinction between terrorism
and political protest. FBI officials defended the involvement
of counterterrorism agents in providing security for
the Republican and Democratic conventions as an administrative
convenience.

The documents were released by the FBI in response
to a lawsuit filed by a coalition of civil rights, animal
rights and environmental groups that say they have been
subjected to scrutiny by task forces set up to combat
terrorism. The FBI has denied
targeting the groups because of their political views.

"It's increasingly clear that
the government is involved in political surveillance
of organizations that are involved in nothing more than
lawful First Amendment activities," said Anthony
Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "It raises
very serious questions about whether the FBI is back
to its old tricks."

A Sept. 4, 2003, document addressed to the FBI counterterrorism
unit described plans by a group calling itself RNC Not
Welcome to "disrupt" the 2004 Republican National
Convention in New York. It also described Internet postings
from an umbrella organization known as United for Peace
and Justice, which was coordinating worldwide protests
against the convention.

"It's one thing to monitor
protests and protest organizers, but quite another thing
to refer them to your counterterrorism unit,"
said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for
Peace and Justice.

Another document, addressed to the Joint Terrorism
Task Force, which coordinates anti-terrorist activities
by the FBI and local police forces, described threats
to disrupt the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Responding to the lawsuit filed in May in U.S. District
Court in Washington, the FBI
said it had identified 1,173 pages of records relating
to the ACLU and 2,383 pages relating to Greenpeace.
The content of the records, which were generated since
2001, is not known.

FBI spokesmen declined to discuss the case on the record
on the grounds that it is being adjudicated. Speaking
on background, an FBI official said that many of the
records were routine correspondence. He said the FBI
counterterrorism unit received reports on possible threats
to the 2004 political conventions because of its role
in ensuring security.

Comment: There
is indeed a huge difference between simply monitoring
protests and referring the matter to counterterrorism
units. There are many countries in the world where protest
is allowed and even expected. Law enforcement officials
in such countries simply monitor the progress of the
protests and ensure everyone's safety by doing things
like stopping traffic when the marchers reach busy intersections.

The simple fact of the matter is that if peaceful protests
and publicly expressing a dissenting view are now considered
to be synonymous with terrorism, then democracy is dead
in the US. Not to worry, though - with the London bombings,
it seems the rest of the world is being slowly herded
in the same direction. The following flashbacks are
a taste of what is to come for all of us:

BOSTON, July 25 - The streets around
the Democratic National Convention site resembled an
armed camp on Sunday - helicopters overhead, bomb-sniffing
dogs and their handlers, police officers and soldiers
lining the intersections, many kinds of barriers, and
an officially designated "Free Speech Zone"
sealed off with cyclone fencing and razor wire.

It looked like an empty cage.

The designated demonstration area, a dank place under
abandoned elevated tracks, failed its first test on
Sunday when what will probably be the largest demonstration
of the convention period simply walked right by it.

"We never intended to use it," said Rachel
Nasca of Boston Answer, the main protest coalition,
marching at the head of the line. "We never even
bothered to take it to court. Did you see that thing?"

Indeed, the Free Speech Zone is rapidly becoming the
hottest local issue of the convention, with most of
the protest groups vowing to boycott it. The only protesters
to embrace it were members of a pro-Palestinian group
that says the cyclone fencing and barbed wire provide
an ideal visual backdrop to their message of opposition
to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

"We want to draw attention to what Palestinians
have been subjected to for years," said Marilyn
Levin of the group, United for Justice With Peace. "We
can leave our cage, but Palestinians cannot leave theirs."

Sunday's demonstrators, mostly antiwar, numbering about
3,000 by police estimate, marched for about two hours
in a big circle from the Boston Common over the top
of Beacon Hill past the FleetCenter, the convention
site, proceeding back past Government Center to the
common, without serious incident. There was a brief
scuffle with one of many anti-abortion protesters, who
were also out in force.

[...] The demonstrators were escorted by hundreds of
city and state police officers, preceded by policemen
on bicycles pedaling at a gruelingly slow pace, and
trailed by police S.U.V.'s, correction department detention
wagons and even school buses, to be used in case of
large-scale arrests. Lines of police - city to the left,
state to the right - moved alongside, flanking the demonstrators,
and there were phalanxes of officers at the intersections.

The police turnout was only one indication of the security
precautions that have turned the FleetCenter into a
virtual fortress. Helicopters and jet fighters patrol
overhead, and Coast Guard and police gunboats cruise
the harbor. National Guardsmen in camouflage patrolled
around the convention center, which is surrounded by
double rows of iron fencing.

[...] While the labor dispute was settled, the battle
over the Free Speech Zone continues. After the American
Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild
filed suit against the zone, Judge Douglas P. Woodlock
of Federal District Court toured the site last week
and said that while he intitially doubted the lawyers'
claim that the site resembled "an internment camp,"
he concluded that the comparison was "an understatement."

"One cannot concieve of other elements
put in place to create a space that's more of an affront
to the idea of free expression than the designated demonstration
zone," he said in a ruling on Thursday.

Nevertheless, Judge Woodcock said, there was
no alternative. He told the lawyers: "There really
isn't any other place. You're stuck under the tracks."

Comment: Is
there a better symbol for Bush's America? The judge
admits that to compare it to an internment camp is "an
understatement", it is "an affront to the
idea of free expression", and yet, ah, yes, and
yet, "There really isn't any other place. You're
stuck under the tracks"! All Americans are now
"stuck under the tracks", but to change metaphors,
they are the tracks of the fascist express steamrolling
over American rights and liberties.

Half-an-hour ago, around 3:30 pm,
plainclothes Secret Service pulled a Mid-Eastern looking
fellow out from the permitted demonstration as around
1,000 antiwar protesters marched past a check-point,
and arrested him.

A crowd of around 25 people followed the police through
an alleyway that opened onto a large mall, where the
"detained" person sat on a stairway hands
cuffed behind his back, surrounded by police.

While the crowd chanted, "This is racial profiling"
and "let him go", a lawyer for the demonstration,
John Pavos, arrived, but was not afforded much time
and no privacy to talk with the arrestee. The police
maintained at first that he was not under arrest, but
that if he'd allow them to take his picture they'd run
in through their computers and let him go. He allowed
them to take his picture. A
few minutes later the police decided not to let him
go.

What was the crime? Police
spokespeople say he was arrested for walking past a
checkpoint and looking around "a little too curiously."

The fact that we were
ALL looking around curiously at the enormous fencings
surrounding the Fleet Center where the Democratic National
Convention begins tomorrow did not seem to matter to
the police, who were clearly under orders from federal
officials. The person -- who to me appeared like any
Graduate Student at the New School in NY -- was detained
solely because of his Middle-Eastern appearance, male
and bearded.

He was taken to a nearby police center to be questioned
by the Secret Service. A reporter for Binghamton IndyMedia
recorded the whole thing on camcorder, and will shortly
be up on the web.

The demonstration itself was very vibrant and full
of energy, challenging both parties' support for the
war against Iraq and decimation of the Bill of Rights.
I carried a sign -- one of many -- that said "Expose
the Truth about 9-11", and was interviewed on NY
1, for any New Yorkers interested in checking it out.
I was also interviewed on Japanese television, in which
I began by saying "The Democratic Party is the
Roach Motel of Politics; the progressive people go in,
and they never come out."

The press were mostly
focused in their questions about the potential for violence
by the demonstrators. I told them that as a participant
in Chicago in 1968 and Seattle in 1999, and many antiwar
protests in between, that it has generally been the
police and the government that initiated violence, clubbing
people, teargassing them, shooting them with electric
stun guns, and so forth. It is the government and military
that are bombing the hell out of Iraq and other countries,
not the protesters, and the same people that are committing
the violence abroad are perpetrating it here at home,
while orchestrating fear and mass hysteria to put into
place fascist mechanisms.

Just also got word that they just evacuated the building
at Staples due to suspicions of some package that they
found. (Nothing, of course.) All
done to perpetrate panic.

While the demonstrators stood around the police chanting
"Let Him Go," a group of Bostonians stood
on top of the steps and counter-chanted: "Let's
go Red Sox."

"Go Reds, Smash State," I muttered (secretly
rooting for the NY Yankees, who are here at Fenway Park
this afternoon).

Comment: There
you have it: Middle-Eastern people can be arrested in
the US for simply looking at things.

Mark Harris, a 20-year veteran
of the Air Force, was not pleased to see a sign-carrying
Iraq war protester in Thursday night's Mexico Volunteer
Fire Department Field Days parade.

What he saw happen to the man, though, raised some
questions for him and, he said, his children.

An Oswego County sheriff's deputy
pulled Joshua A. Davies, 23, of 25B North St. in Mexico,
out of the parade and charged him with disorderly conduct.Davies had been walking in the
parade carrying, Harris said, an "Impeach Bush"
sign and another sign calling for an end to the war
in Iraq.

Harris said he saw Davies get searched, handcuffed
and put in a sheriff's patrol car. Harris said Davies
was kept in the car until the parade ended about 45
minutes later.

"My kids watched it," said
Harris. "Some asked, 'Can they do that?' "

They were talking about what
the deputy did, not the protester. And it wasn't
just children asking the question, Harris said. "There
were older people, senior citizens, saying it too."

Oswego County Sheriff Reuel Todd said Davies was arrested
because he was a spectator who jumped into the middle
of the parade. "He was not entered in the parade,"
Todd said.

"We had a complaint that he disrupted
the parade," Todd added. "He was arrested
and released on an appearance ticket."

A man who answered the phone at the Mexico fire station,
who declined to give his name, said Friday that all
anyone had to do to be in the parade was ask permission.

"I felt bad that he was there," Harris said
of Davies, "but I thought he had the right to his
opinion."

"This was a signal to the kids
that you can't do that here," Harris said. "Dissent,
I mean. I thought that's what being an American means
– the right to protest, to speak your mind."

DES MOINES, Iowa - The nation's
governors voiced sharp worries Saturday for the National
Guard troops they share with the federal government,
saying changes caused by the huge demands of the war
in Iraq need more examination.

More than 30 governors gathered here for their summer
meeting, where they were scheduled to meet privately
on Monday with top officials of the Guard, the Department
of Veterans Affairs and the
Homeland Security Department.

Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the Republican incoming
chairman of the National Governors Association, said
more attention must be paid to the needs of Guard members
returning from overseas deployments, especially younger
members who need to find work.

South Dakota Gov. Mike Round, a Republican, said the
Guard's recruiting system still works, but the stresses
of the war are showing.

He is concerned that troops
returning from the war zone may resign if their spouses
and parents raise objections to continued service.
"The second time around, will they be allowed to
re-enlist? That's the question," he said.

Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat, said leaders
need to consider ways to accommodate older members of
the Guard and Reserves who want to do their part but
cannot be expected to undertake long-term, overseas
deployment when they have careers and families.

States often rely on their Air and Army Guard units
to help in emergencies such as hurricanes, earthquakes
or riots. The part-time soldiers
are not often brought under federal control for missions
such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There has been an easing of worries among governors
that the overseas demands would leave states without
the National Guard members needed to respond to state
emergencies. Warner said Guard officials have offered
assurances they would limit call-ups.

But bigger questions remain, he said. "I don't
feel we've had the full deliberations about what the
role of the Guard will be," said Warner, who has
been exploring a possible presidential bid.

"Most governors would say we're putting more strain
on our Guard and Reserves than many people are fully
comfortable with," said Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty,
a Republican.

More than 250,000 National Guard troops have been mobilized
for active duty since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks, according to Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, the Army
general in charge of National Guard forces.

"You haven't seen these kinds
of participation from the states since the Civil War,"
Idaho's GOP Gov. Dirk Kempthorne said.

National Guard soldiers represent
about 40 percent of the U.S. ground force in Iraq.
That is scheduled to drop significantly next year when
the Army deploys two newly expanded active-duty divisions
- the 101st Airborne and the 4th Infantry.

IRAQ is slipping into all-out civil
war, a Shia leader declared yesterday, as a devastating
onslaught of suicide bombers slaughtered more than 150
people, most of them Shias, around the capital at the
weekend.

One bomber killed almost 100
people when he blew up a fuel tanker south of Baghdad,
an attack aimed at snapping Shia patience and triggering
the full-blown sectarian war that al-Qaeda has been
trying to foment for almost two years.

Iraq's security forces have
been overwhelmed by the scale of the suicide bombings
- 11 on Friday alone and many more over the weekend
- ordered by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"What is truly happening, and
what shall happen, is clear: a war against the Shias,"
Sheikh Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, a prominent Shia cleric
and MP, told the Iraqi parliament.

Sheikh al-Saghir is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani,
the supreme Shia spiritual leader and moderate who has
so far managed to restrain powerful Shia militias from
undertaking any outright attack on Sunni insurgents.
His warning suggests that the Shia leadership may be
losing its grip over Shias who in private often call
for an armed backlash against their Sunni assailants.

The sheikh also cautioned Sunni clerics supporting
the insurgency against American forces and the Shia-Kurdish
Government elected in January. "I am very keen
to preserve the Sunni blood that would be shed due to
the irrational acts of some of their leaders, who do
not see that they are leading the country into civil
war," he told the national assembly.

On the streets of Baghdad, al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda organisation
in Iraq unleashed one suicide bomber after another and
promised no respite.

"The Hassan Ibrahim al-Zaidi attack continues
for the second day in a row, with rigged cars, martyrdom
attacks and clashes," an al-Qaeda internet statement
said. "We warn the enemies of God of more to come."
One of the suicide bombers, a Libyan, was arrested at
the mass funerals of 32 Shia children killed last week
by a car bomber.

But the worst attack occurred
in the mixed town of Musaib, in the area south of Baghdad
known as the Triangle of Death, when a fuel tanker blew
up in a crowded market near a mosque on Saturday evening.
The death toll rose to 98 yesterday, making it one the
deadliest attacks yet.

Relatives searched the shattered market for the body
parts of missing loved ones. "I saw a lot of burnt
bodies after the explosion and many people throwing
their children from the windows and balconies because
the buildings were on fire," Ammar al-Qaragouli
said.

Iraqi soldiers have set up checkpoints to try to rein
in the bombers, only to become sitting ducks. Two
dozen more people died yesterday in four suicide bombings
targeting US and Iraqi security forces.

At least one desperate parliamentarian called for the
population to form local militias to defend their neighbourhoods
- a move that many see as prelude to a sectarian war.

"The plans of the Interior
and Defence ministries to impose security in Iraq have
failed to stop the terrorists. We need to bring
back popular security committees," Khudair al-Khuzai,
a senior parliamentarian who claimed that 50 fellow
MPs supported him, said. But with the streets of Baghdad
seething with fear, anger and rumours of impending conflict,
confidence in anything that the Government says has
plummeted. A poll in the state-sponsored
al-Sabah newspaper indicated that 51 per cent of Iraqis
see the Government's performance as weak, while only
32 per cent approved. Fuelling the sectarian
tension, leaflets are being distributed in southern
Baghdad threatening named Shia "collaborators"
with execution. Increasingly hardline Shia militias,
such as the outlawed Mahdi Army of the cleric Moqtada
al-Sadr, are patrolling large parts of Baghdad, often
rounding up suspected Sunni insurgents and imprisoning
or even killing them. With the country in turmoil, much
of the Government, including Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the
Shia Prime Minister, was on a landmark trip to try to
repair relations with Iran, where President Khatami
hailed a "turning point" in relations between
the neighbours. He promised that his country would do
all in its power to rebuild Iraq. But closer ties with
Iran's Shia theocracy has alarmed Iraqi Sunnis, who
accuse Iran of interfering.

John Reid, the British Defence
Secretary, told CNN yesterday that Britain could start
to reduce its troop levels in Iraq over the next 12
months. He said that neither Britain nor America
had any imperialist ambitions and were anxious that
Iraqi forces should assume responsibility for security.
[...]

Comment: Italy
recently
announced it might begin withdrawing its troops
from Iraq in September, Britain is now saying its troop
levels will be reduced in the next year, and US leaders
continue to claim that American soldiers will be slowly
pulled out despite the escalating violence. It appears
that the plan is to make sure that Iraq is plunged into
a civil war. Such a conflict would provide fertile ground
for the rise of the budding fascist security forces.
A new brutal Iraqi regime - employing
Saddam's torturers and loyal to the US, of course
- will take over, freeing up the Coalition of the Billing
to continue the battle on other fronts in the war on
terror.

MOUNT ST. HELENS NATIONAL
MONUMENT, WASH. - A magnitude 3 earthquake rattled Mount
St. Helens on Friday, triggering rockfall and sending
an ash plume above the crater rim, the U.S. Geological
Survey reported.

The quake occurred at 5:22 a.m., the largest recorded
at the volcano in several months. Its cause was not immediately
known.

In the past two days scientists have placed new Global
Positioning Systems and a seismic station on the east
and west sides of the glacier. Gas-emission readings earlier
this week showed little change.[...]

HILO, Hawaii (AP) --
An earthquake shook the Big Island early Friday, but there
were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

The magnitude 5.5 quake, which hit at 5:49 a.m., was
centered in the Pacific Ocean off the Big Island's northeast
coast, according to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.
No tsunami was expected, the center said.

Lanny Nakano, acting administrator of the Hawaii County
Civil Defense, said police officers across the island,
as far away as Kailua-Kona on its west coast, reported
feeling tremors.

A moderate earthquake
jolted the southern Pakistan city of Karachi early Saturday
just hours after a smaller tremor awoke residents in the
port city, an official said. There were no reports of
injuries.

The magnitude 5.5 quake struck at 7:17 a.m (0217 GMT)
and was centered about 500 kilometers (310 miles) north
of Karachi in the mountains of neighboring Baluchistan
province, said Abdul Hameed, an official at the seismological
center in Karachi.

Nasir Mahmood, a seismological official in the northwestern
city of Peshawar, said the temblor was felt in Karachi
and other parts of Baluchistan.

Hours earlier, a magnitude 4.3 quake awoke residents
in many parts of Karachi. Hameed said the epicenter of
that quake was not immediately known. No injuries or damage
were reported in either of the tremors.

Moderate earthquakes are common in Pakistan and many
are often centered in the Hindu Kush mountains in neighboring
Afghanistan.

BARSTOW, Calif. (AP)
- Two small earthquakes hit eastern San Bernardino County
late Friday, but there were no reports of damage or injuries,
authorities said.

A 3.8-magnitude quake struck just before 10 p.m. about
40 miles east of Barstow and a second 3.5-magnitude temblor
hit at 11:46 p.m. in the same area, according to preliminary
reports from the U.S. Geological Survey.

There were no reports of damage or injury from either
earthquake, according to a San Bernardino County dispatch
operator.

Jakarta (DPA): A 5.6-magnitude
earthquake jolted the eastern Indonesian province of East
Nusa Tenggara on Monday morning, but there were no reports
of casualty or damage, officials said.

The quake shook Kupang, the provincial capital of East
Nusa Tenggara on the western part of Timor island at about
8:05 a.m. local time, said Wijayanto, an official at Jakarta's
Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMG).

Wijayanto said the tremblor's epicenter was in the sea,
33-kilometers beneath the seabed, about 104 kilometers
east of Kupang, which lies about 2,160 kilometers east
of Jakarta.

He said there were no reports of injury or structural
damage.

In November 2004, a 6.0-magnitude earthquake shook the
nearby island of Alor and other regions, leaving at least
27 people dead and injuring dozens of others.

A moderate earthquake
shook Myanmar's main archaeological site in the ancient
capital of Bagan today, an official said. No damage was
reported.

The magnitude-5.5 quake hit at 7:35 a.M. (0635 IST),
the official at the government's Seismic Department said.
Residents of Bagan contacted by phone said they hardly
felt the tremor.

The quake was centered near Nyaung-U, 430 kms north of
Yangon, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Nyaung-U is about 11 kms from Bagan, which has thousands
of 11th and 12th century Buddhist stupas and temples.

HILO, Hawaii (AP) —
For the second time in less than a week an estimated 5.2
magnitude earthquake shook the Big Island.

No injuries or damage were reported as the result of
the quake, which struck about 9:15 a.m. Sunday and was
felt throughout the Big Island and as far away as Maui
and Oahu.

The U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory
located the quake about 69 miles south of Hilo. The quake
is the biggest recorded in that area since the observatory
began monitoring 43 years ago.

The latest quake was not related to another magnitude
5.2 earthquake off the northeast coast early Friday morning,
said Jim Kauahikaua, Hawaiian Volcano Observatory scientist-in-charge.

CANCUN, Mexico (AP) -- Hurricane
Emily roared over the island of Cozumel early Monday
and lashed Cancun's famous white-sand beaches with rain
and punishing waves, ripping down billboards and forcing
thousands of tourists to evacuate to higher ground.

The Category 4 storm caused heavy flooding that swept
four people to their deaths in Jamaica on Saturday.
In Mexico, it downed signs, toppled trees and whipped
white sands from the beaches in Cancun.

Power outages were reported in Cancun and in Playa
del Carmen, a resort town south of Cancun, as well as
on the islands of Cozumel and las Mujeres.

Emily's winds decreased from 145 mph to 135 mph as
it bore down on the Mexican coastline Sunday evening.
Forecasters say it will likely weaken further as it
heads across the peninsula and enters the Gulf of Mexico.

Two people also were killed in a helicopter crash in
the Gulf of Mexico as more than 15,500 workers were
evacuated from offshore oil platforms, raising to seven
the number of people killed in the second major hurricane
of the Atlantic season.

Emily was likely to make landfall
again on Wednesday anywhere from northeastern Mexico
to southern Texas, said Jack Beven, a hurricane
specialist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
He cautioned it was too early to make a precise prediction.

In Cancun, hundreds of buses moved more than 25,000
tourists, many clutching pillows, to temporary shelters,
part of the nearly 60,000 people being evacuated from
resort towns like Tulum and Playa de Carmen.

Cancun's airport closed Sunday afternoon after thousands
lined up at ticket counters, trying to get flights out
before the storm hit.

"We're not going to sleep tonight," Cancun
Mayor Francisco Alor said.

By late afternoon, heavy winds tugged at palm trees
and sent the last people at the beach running for their
cars.

One Cancun resident, 23-year-old Christopher Espinoza,
braved howling bursts of wind to look out over the pounding
surf. "The waves are already starting to take away
part of the beach," he said.

Erosion has long been a problem for Cancun, and waves
were starting to lap almost at the doorsteps of some
hotels.

Hundreds of mostly foreign tourists lay shoulder-to-shoulder
on thin foam pads in a sweltering gymnasium near the
center of Cancun, one of Mexico's most popular tourist
destinations known for its white-sand beaches, sprawling
hotel complexes and all-night discos. [...]

Cancun's mayor, Francisco Alor, said the city was preparing
for a near-direct hit by Emily.

"This hurricane is coming with the same force
as Gilbert," he said referring to a notorious 1988
hurricane that killed 300 people in Mexico and the Caribbean.

The city's last big evacuation was for Gilbert. But
in 1988, the city and surrounding resort areas had only
about 8,000 hotel rooms. That number has since grown
to over 50,000. [...]

In Jamaica, torrential rains drenched the south coast
and washed away at least three houses, while a man,
a woman, an infant boy and his 5-year-old sister were
swept away in a car Saturday night. Searchers on Sunday
found the four bodies trapped inside the car, which
was filled with mud and other debris, police said.

The Cayman Islands escaped major damage Saturday. The
islands and a handful of other Caribbean countries were
devastated last year when three catastrophic hurricanes
_ Frances, Ivan and Jeanne _ tore through the region
with a collective ferocity not seen in years, causing
hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in damage.

Late Sunday, the center of the storm was 50 miles southeast
of Cozumel, an island just south of Cancun, and was
approaching the peninsula at about 20 mph. [...]

State oil company Pemex removed the last few hundred
workers from oil platforms on the Gulf of Mexico. Strong
winds downed a helicopter participating in the evacuation
on Saturday night, killing a pilot and co-pilot, the
company said.

The platform evacuations closed 63
wells and halting the production of 480,000 barrels
of oil per day.

Emily has unleashed heavy surf, gusty winds and torrential
rains across the Caribbean, hitting hard Thursday at
Grenada, where at least one man was killed when his
home was buried under a landslide.

The storm trailed Hurricane Dennis, which killed at
least 25 people in Haiti and 16 in Cuba earlier this
month.

Forecasters have predicted up to 15 Atlantic tropical
storms this year, including three to five major hurricanes.
The hurricane season began June 1 and runs through Nov.
30.

TAIPEI - China evacuated over 600,000
people from coastal areas on Monday after typhoon Haitang
slammed into Taiwan, killing up to four people, injuring
25 and forcing offices, schools and markets to shut
across the island.

At 1300 GMT, Haitang was packing maximum winds of 144
km/h (89 mph), down from a previous 184 km/h, and gusts
of up to 180 km/h, weaker than the earlier 227 km/h,
said Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau.

If the typhoon stays on its present course, it will
hit China's southeastern coast on Tuesday afternoon.

"Based on our current forecast data, it should
make landfall in mainland China around 2 p.m. local
time," said Daniel Wu, director of the bureau's
forecasting center, noting the margin of error was around
two to three hours.

The official death toll in Taiwan stood at one -- a
man killed by falling rocks -- but the National Fire
Agency said another three bodies had been found. They
were not included in the official tally as the cause
of death is still being investigated.

Another person was swept away while fishing, the agency
said, and 25 people had been injured in the storm, which
was weakening as it swept southwest across Taiwan toward
China's coastal rice-growing provinces of Zhejiang and
Fujian.

Weather forecasters warned torrential rain would continue
to hammer the island through to Wednesday, but Taipei
and most local governments said business will resume
on Tuesday.

LANDSLIDES AND FLOODS

Haitang has already dumped over 1 meter (3 ft 3 in)
of rain on mountainous areas in the northeast, prompting
the government to warn of potentially deadly landslides
and flash floods.

Across the strait, authorities in China's Fujian and
Zhejiang provinces ordered back to port some 17,000
fishing and merchant ships with a total of more than
300,000 aboard, the Xinhua news agency reported.

On land, officials in the rice-growing region evacuated
600,000 with homes in the storm's projected path, Xinhua
said.

Travel services were suspended and seaside hotels in
Fujian closed to guests.

In normally bustling Taipei, the lashing winds emptied
streets for most of the day as residents hunkered down
at home to ride out the first typhoon to make landfall
this year.

The northern city is Taiwan's political and financial
center and home to the world's tallest building, the
508 m (1,667 ft) Taipei 101, which was built to withstand
the strongest typhoon in a 100-year cycle, or gale-force
winds of 216 km/h.

"There were strong gusts of wind every five or
six minutes, forcing me to stop my scooter when I was
riding to work," said David Lin, a security guard
in Taipei. "Every time I heard a loud noise I was
afraid I would be hit by debris," he said.

In 2001, one of Taiwan's deadliest years for storms,
Typhoon Toraji killed 200 people. A few months later,
Typhoon Nari caused Taipei's worst flooding on record
and killed 100.

Among Chinese cities threatened by the storm is the
manufacturing hub of Wenzhou -- which churns out everything
from cigarette lighters to shoes -- where heavy rain
was expected from Monday evening and nearly 80,000 people
were evacuated.

Typhoons gather strength from warm sea waters and tend
to dissipate after making landfall. They frequently
hit Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong and southern
China during a season that starts in early summer and
lasts until late autumn.

On top of a severe drought, France
is fighting a plague of hundreds of thousands of locusts.

The locusts are devouring everything from crops to
window-box flowers, reported the Observer.

"At the beginning they seem small, insignificant
insects but they grow very quickly," said Aveyron
region farmer Gerard Laussel. "They eat everything
that is green, leaving only stalks, and when they have
finished they leave some kind of scent so the cattle
do not want to graze on what is left."

The French environment ministry said
drought could be felt across most of France, but it
mostly impacted from the Atlantic Ocean to Paris.

"There is nothing we can do for the 700 or 800
farmers affected," said Patrice Lemoux, an agriculture
official. "The locust has
no known predator and the only insecticides which might
make a difference are banned."

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (AP) - Eighty-six
Squared has never been in a hurry. The Black Angus bull
was born 15 years after cells from his genetic donor,
Bull 86, were frozen as part of a study on natural disease
resistance. When Bull 86 died in 1997, scientists thought
his unique genetic makeup was lost. But researchers
at Texas A&M University were able to clone him from
the frozen cells in 2000.

Now 5 years old, 86 Squared spends his days grazing
on a rural area of the A&M campus. He was in no
rush to greet recent visitors, slowly sauntering from
deep inside his large metal pen.

Similarly, Texas A&M researchers know animal cloning
can't be rushed. Through painstaking experimentation,
A&M is the world's first
academic institution to clone six species in six years:
cattle, a boer goat, pigs, a deer, a horse and - most
famously - a cat named cc.

"Generally the way these things go is you do an
experiment and then you do another experiment, then
you do another experiment," said Mark Westhusin,
lead researcher with the A&M cloning team. "It's
slow, painstaking work to get little bitty pieces of
information that you hope will one day help and improve
the technology."

A&M scientists say the cloning research could result
in the creation of disease-resistant livestock, saving
the agriculture industry millions of dollars and increasing
food production.

Yet A&M's success has fueled the debate about the
growing use of cloning, whether it is unnecessarily
cruel to animals and whether the potential benefits
are overblown.

The cloning team, working in a nondescript one-story
brick building on the A&M campus, harvests eggs
from animal ovaries. The delicate procedure is performed
with micromanipulators - a high-tech microscope that
holds an unfertilized egg in place while its nucleus
is removed and a cultured cell is put inside.

The cell and egg are then fused through
electric stimulation to create an embryo that is implanted
in the uterus of a surrogate mother.

"We've just been very good at being able to manage
every single aspect of that from beginning to end,"
Westhusin said.

But for all the technological breakthroughs, Westhusin
said cloning remains an inefficient process. A&M
researchers say only 1 percent to 5 percent of cloning
procedures succeed. [...]

A&M researchers are focused on trying to create
livestock resistant to disease, particularly foot-and-mouth
and mad cow disease. Bull 86 was naturally resistant
to brucellosis, tuberculosis and other diseases. Eighty-six
Squared has the same qualities. [...]

"Animal cloning has resulted in a lot of issues
with deaths and deformities that have been the norm,
not the exception," said Lisa Archer, a spokeswoman
for Friends of the Earth, the U.S. arm of an international
environmental group.

She said an A&M study released
in 2002 documented a 94 percent failure rate in efforts
to clone pigs. Twenty-eight piglets were born without
an anus and tail, a fatal condition. [...]

Comment: The
article fails to mention their greatest success. By
combining a donkey cell with a human egg and zapping
it to life à la Dr. Frankenstein, researchers
were able to engineer the first humanimal: George W.
Bush.

HOUSTON
- America's largest church celebrated its move into
the former arena for the Houston Rockets with a capacity
crowd of 16,000, an upbeat sermon from its televangelist
pastor and a spirited welcome from the governor of Texas.

"How do you like our new home?" Lakewood
Church pastor Joel Osteen asked to thunderous applause.
"It looks pretty good doesn't it? This is a dream
come true."

The new home for the nondenominational Christian church
is the former Compaq Center, once home to the Rockets.

There were no vacant spots in the arena as Lakewood,
which recently became the first church in the United
States to average more than 30,000 worshippers weekly,
held its first service there Saturday night. The service
also was televised live.

Gov. Rick Perry praised the church's
new look and told the crowd, "As lawmakers we do
a lot of things, but only the church can teach people
to love.

"This is nothing short of amazing," Perry
said. "It is so great to look across this crowd
and see the wonderful diversity of this great state
we call Texas."

It took more than 15 months and $75 million to complete
the renovations - which included adding five stories
to make more room.

"I couldn't believe how beautiful it was,"
Osteen said afterward when asked to describe how he
felt when he first entered what he called the "Texas-sized"
sanctuary. "It almost felt surreal." [...]

The service was highlighted by a 25-minute sermon by
Osteen, who told the crowd that he and his wife, Victoria,
went on their first date in the arena 19 years ago.

The crowd roared with approval throughout the message
and was often brought to its feet as Osteen spoke in
front of a large golden-colored globe that rotated slowly.

Members of the choir swayed happily, belting out several
different songs below pictures of a crisp blue sky with
puffy white clouds.

While collection plates were passed, video messages
from people around the world, including Pastor T.D.
Jakes of the Potter's House in Dallas, welcomed Lakewood
to its new location.

"It is overwhelming, unbelievable, fantastic,"
Ann Bell, one of the church's original members, said
after the service. "Words can't even describe it."